Report: More Surfing, Less E-Shopping in January

With the holidays over, Internet users worldwide did more surfing than shopping in January, according to a new report from NetRatings (Nasdaq: NTRT), which measured at-home Web use in 29 countries.

In fact, Internet use skyrocketed in January, with people spending more time online, viewing more pages and logging on more often than they did in December, the report said.

Browsers, Not Buyers

But among the top 25 sites, it was search engines, not e-tailers, that saw the biggest gains in unique visitors during the month. According to NetRatings analyst Richard Goosey, this indicates that people are using the Internet more often to find information than to buy goods and services.

"With the close of the holiday shopping season, Internet users were back to the business of truly 'surfing' the Internet, and they logged on to Ask Jeeves and Google to conduct those online searches," Goosey said.

Forrester analyst Christopher Kelley said he is not surprised that global e-commerce was weaker in January.

"The holiday season is certainly the strongest for e-commerce, and in a similar fashion to traditional retail , January sales should not be expected to be as strong as December sales," Kelley told the E-Commerce Times.

Average time spent online during January was 10 hours and 17 minutes, up 10.26 percent over December figures. Web users visited an average of 47 different domains in the first month of the new year, up 9 percent over December.

Goosey said those numbers "underscore a change from more targeted shopping activity in December to general Internet surfing in January."

Engines Beat E-Tailers

Yahoo! was the most popular site during the month, with its number of unique visitors increasing 3.58 percent. On average, users visited the site nine times in January and spent a total of one hour and eight minutes there.

Ask Jeeves and Google both saw bigger increases in their number of unique visitors -- 13.42 percent and 12.5 percent, respectively -- but visitors spent less than 20 minutes during the month on both sites. European portal and service provider Wanadoo also saw a big jump in visitors, with unique users up 13.1 percent.

E-tailers fared less well. Amazon ranked seventh among the top 25 sites, but its number of unique visitors fell 4.26 percent. Users visited the site an average of twice during the month, spending just 12 minutes there.

On the other hand, EBay posted a gain: Its total unique visitors increased 1.91 percent. Users spent an average of one hour and 35 minutes on the auction site in January.

Growth Expected

Despite the reported decline in overall e-shopping activity, NetRatings analyst David Day said he expects e-commerce to continue to grow.

"Surfing to commerce sites such as Amazon.com is seasonal, so we'd expect traffic to fall off somewhat after the Christmas period," Day told the E-Commerce Times. "However, we also see underlying commerce activity continuing to grow on a year-on-year basis as new surfers continue to join the Web and existing users become more relaxed about entering credit card numbers and other confidential information to buy goods and services."

More Users

Overall Web use was up in January, with an active universe of more than 260 million people -- more than 6 million more than in December.

Most of that increase came in the United Kingdom and Korea, where the number of active Web users increased by more than 3 million in each country. The UK increase, which Goosey said is the biggest ever recorded, was due to falling prices, better availability of fixed-rate connections and heavy advertising by AOL and other major Internet companies.

Web use increased in most other countries, too, but it declined in Japan, Sweden, Hong Kong, Argentina, India, Norway, Singapore, Israel, New Zealand and South Africa.