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HITWISE UK JANUARY SALES UPDATE

Searches for post-Christmas sales more than trebled in 2007

London, Thursday 3 January 2008 Hitwise, the leading online competitive intelligence service, today reveals that the number of UK consumers searching for post-Christmas sales online more than trebled during the 2007 holiday period. There were 249% more UK Internet searches for the term 'sales' for the week ending 29 December 2007 than for the comparable week in 2006. There was also a 200% increase in searches for the term 'sale' over the same period.

"The post-Christmas online sales are becoming more and more important to retailers every year," commented Robin Goad, Hitwise UK Director of Research. "Online holiday shopping started earlier then ever this year, but a sluggish last couple of weeks before Christmas also forced many retailers to discount goods and start their sales earlier. For some online retailers, the January sales started on Christmas Day. In fact, Boxing Day was the busiest online shopping day of 2007, and there were almost more searches for 'boxing day sales' this year than there were for 'january sales' last year. As a result of this sales fever, weekly UK Internet traffic to Shopping and Classifieds websites increased by 13% between 22 and 29 December this year."

Play.com sees the biggest online sales boost 

Play.com received the most traffic from UK consumers searching for sale bargains. The online entertainment retailer received over a quarter of all UK Internet traffic from searches for 'sales' and 'sale' for the four weeks ending 29 December 2007. As a result, Play.com saw its market share of all UK Internet visits increase by 15% between 22 and 29 December, when it became the 4th most visited Shopping and Classifieds website in the UK.

Top 3 Shopping and Classifieds websites receiving traffic from the term 'sale', week ending 29 December 2007:

Rank

Website

URL

Share of traffic from the search term 'sale'

1

Play.com

play.com

27.0%

2

Tesco Direct

direct.tesco.com

7.0%

3

Littlewoods

littlewoods.com

5.4%

The second and third most popular websites receiving traffic from UK Internet searches for 'sale' were Tesco Direct and Littlewoods. Meanwhile, 'next sale' was the most popular search term containing the word 'sale' for the four weeks ending 29 December, and was the second fastest moving search during the same period.

Weekly UK Internet searches for the terms 'sales' and 'sale':

image 1

Weekly UK Internet searches for the terms 'january sales' and 'boxing day sales':

Image 2


About Hitwise:

Hitwise is the leading online competitive intelligence service. Only Hitwise provides its 1,400 clients around the world with daily insights on how their customers interact with a broad range of competitive websites, and how their competitors use different tactics to attract online customers.

Since 1997, Hitwise has pioneered a unique, network-based approach to Internet measurement. Through relationships with ISPs around the world, Hitwise's patented methodology anonymously captures the online usage, search and conversion behaviour of 25 million Internet users. This unprecedented volume of Internet usage data is seamlessly integrated into an easy to use, web-based service, designed to help marketers better plan, implement and report on a range of online marketing programs.

Hitwise, a subsidiary of Experian (FTS: EXPN) www.experiangroup.com operates in the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong and Singapore. More information about Hitwise is available at www.hitwise.com.

For up-to-date-analysis of online trends, please visit the Hitwise Intelligence-Analyst Weblogs at http://weblogs.hitwise.com and the Hitwise Data Center at www.hitwise.com/datacenter.

For media enquiries, please contact:

Jannie Cahill

jannie.cahill@hitwise.com

020 7378 3600

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