Study: Brick-and-Clicks Ruled UK Holidays

"Clicks-and-mortar retailers were able to start their holiday preparations and marketing earlier and with higher visibility than their pure-play competitors," said David Day, director of analytics for ACNielsen eRatings.com.

"The 35- to 49-year-old age group is apparently reluctant to use non-established brands," Day said, "so for pure plays, the lesson must be to find ways to expand their appeal to this group."

From September to December, the number of Internet pure plays drawing more than 150,000 visitors in the UK rose from eight sites to 13, but the number of click-and-mortar sites with that level of traffic rose dramatically from one to 11.

As of November, seven of the top 20 e-commerce sites in the UK were operated by well-known offline brands.

Purely Playing

Despite the surge of brick-and-click companies, leading pure-play firms are still riding high in the UK. For example, the UK arm of U.S. giant Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, registered a 40 percent growth in unique visitors over the September to December period, reaching the one million UK visitor mark for the first time.

Amazon's European sites topped the rankings in both England and Germany, but finished fourth in France behind three of the leading French sites.

Still, the attraction of established offline brands on the Internet is only beginning, according to Day.

"Most of their sites are very basic -- and the successful clicks-and-mortar brands in 2001 will be those who use their online channels to increase customer loyalty to the integrated brand, rather than to make a few swift pounds or dollars at the peak times of year," Day said.

Mirror Image

In the U.S., brick-and-click companies have also increasingly found their place among the top U.S. Web sites, edging out Internet-only firms. According to Nielsen//NetRatings, seven of the top 10 U.S. e-commerce sites now belong to the brick-and-click category.

"Judging from the online performance of the United Kingdom's high-street brands, UK e-commerce may before long paint a similar picture," Day said. "The crucial advantage these sites have over their pure-play counterparts is trust. In a year when e-commerce seemed to receive little but bad publicity, the support offered to consumers by a familiar name was worth more than any advertising."

Balancing Act

In the rest of Europe, offline brands might not be doing as a good a job of leveraging their brand name on the Internet. According to the report, the balance between the holiday market share of pure plays and brick-and-clicks was more evenly distributed in France and Germany.

In Germany, none of the top 10 e-commerce brands during the holiday season was a brick-and-click retailer. In France, five brick-and-click stores broke that nation's e-commerce top 20.

"France is a particularly fascinating e-commerce example because it has largely resisted the temptation of the big American brands," Day said. "The recently launched Amazon.fr has caught the online public's imagination, but Amazon.com has never performed as well in France as it has in the other major European markets."

Hong Kong Barrier

Although the majority of the Asia-Pacific region has seen strong growth in e-commerce, the report said that Hong Kong lagged behind. Day said the island geographies of both Hong Kong and Singapore pose additional obstacles to the growth of e-commerce in those countries.

"Since both cities are custom-built for offline shopping, online retailers must add even more value to convince shoppers to stay home and shop on their computers when going out is so relatively easy," Day said.