Internet analytics firm comScore released a report today that shows the most visited retail and auction sites on the Internet. Amazon, to no surprise, is the big winner with 282 million visitors in June. That correlates to 20.4% of the entire worldwide Internet population. Auction site eBay trailed Amazon sites by nearly 60 million visitors to land in second with 223.5 million, or 16.2% of all Internet retail consumers across the globe.
A relatively new entrant into this chart is Alibaba.com, a Chinese Internet retail vendor. It had 156.7 million users to come in third at 11.3%. China has the largest base of Internet users of any country in the world, and it is drawing heavily from the Asia Pacific region, with 85.7% of its visitors coming from the region. One interesting note from comScore’s research is that it seems to have pinned the approximate number of global Internet users at 1.38 billion and change. Web-based retail has been a major force in the U.S. for more than a decade but is just now starting to change how the rest of the world interacts with consumer products.
In its release, comScore notes that online retail is exploding across the world.
“While retail e-commerce has already grown to become a $150+ billion annual industry in the U.S., it still presents enormous upside opportunity across much of the globe,” said Gian Fulgoni, comScore co-founder and chairman. “Technology has changed the way consumers behave, and increasingly they are opting for the convenience and pricing advantages offered by the online channel. Several global retail brands have already capitalized on this global consumer trend, and many other retailers are sure to pursue their share of the pie.”
In a testament to how big the PC and cellular device market is becoming, both Apple and Hewlett-Packard are in the top 10 of online retail sites. Apple comes in fourth worldwide with 134.2 million visitors. Presumably, that includes iTunes, the iOS and Mac App Stores as well. HP is a bit of a surprising member of this list because it has no real popular application store to speak of, yet still had 38.4 million visitors in June, of which 45.1% were from North America. Wal-Mart is a strong online retailer, coming in sixth worldwide with 83.4% of its traffic derived from North America also.
The research was based on comScore’s Media Metrix service that brings together panel-based and server-based analytics for a fuller picture of a site’s worldwide traffic. The research does not include visits from public computers that can be found in libraries or Internet cafes, nor visits from mobile devices, so these numbers are probably a bit (if marginally so) lower than the actual amount of visitors.
