By nearly all accounts, the big weekend of the 2016 holiday season was a success for online retail. One estimate from Adobe Digital Insights pegged total e-commerce sales at $12.8 billion during the five-day period between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday—a 15.2% increase compared to last year.
The bad news for many online retailers is that it appears that a lot of the gains went to web leader Amazon.com Inc., No. 1 in the Internet Retailer 2016 Top 500 Guide, according to an Internet Retailer analysis of web traffic data from SimilarWeb.
A look at total visits to Internet Retailer’s list of Top 100 holiday-oriented shopping sites during the five-day period between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday (the Monday after Thanksgiving), shows that consumers worldwide visited these sites a total of 1.41 billion times. That’s a 14.3% increase compared to 1.23 billion visits during the comparable five-day period last year.
However, Amazon.com comprised 57.6% of that growth, as the site experienced 101.6 million more visits from desktop and mobile users this year than last year. That’s nearly 10 times as much incremental traffic generated by the next highest gainer, Best Buy Co. Inc. (No. 12). Consumers visited BestBuy.com 10.8 million more times from Thanksgiving to Cyber Monday this year versus last year.
Despite the industry’s overall increase in holiday traffic and sales, 29 of the 100 holiday-oriented retail sites experienced traffic declines this year compared to last year’s five-day holiday weekend. The biggest declines came from such big-name web-only merchants and bricks-and-mortar retailers as K-Mart (part of Sears Holdings Corp., No. 14), Old Navy (part of Gap Inc., No. 20), Gilt Groupe (part of Hudson’s Bay Co., No. 75), Gap and QVC Group (No. 10).
The gap between Amazon and the rest of the major holiday-shopping web merchants is even more stark when it comes to mobile traffic. Smartphone and tablet visits to the Top 100 holiday shopping sites reached 723.6 million from Thanksgiving to Cyber Monday this year. That’s a 9.4% increase compared with 661.2 million visits during the comparable period last year.
However, Amazon.com experienced 47.4 million more mobile web visits this year—accounting for more than 75% of all gains on mobile web traffic for the 100 holiday merchant sites tracked by Internet Retailer. Moreover, mobile app visits are not included in this analysis, and multiple studies show that Amazon dominates mobile app purchases.
Modest traffic gains for many retailers during this period do not necessarily mean that online sales for the same merchants were a disappointment during the long holiday weekend. In general, visits to shopping sites are not growing on a year-over-year basis as much as they have in previous years, though online sales growth has remained steady over the past few years at around 15%.
This suggests that online retailers are getting better at converting existing traffic, as opposed to driving sales increases with more traffic to their sites. In addition, holiday shoppers are more focused in their browsing, preferring sites that they have shopped during previous holidays, rather than searching among multiple sites to compare prices.
Ultimately, Internet Retailer estimates that Amazon comprised nearly 40% of retail purchases in the U.S. during the period between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday.