Jewelry sites among top gainers in December
Retail jewelry Web sites trailed only cosmetics and consumer goods in category growth from unique visitors during the month of December, an analysis by ComScore Inc. reveals.
As consumers rushed to complete their holiday gift lists online, the analysis showed that fragrance and cosmetics sites experienced a 30 percent increase in the number of unique visitors between November and December, followed by consumer-goods sites with a 23 percent increase, and jewelry, luxury goods and accessories sites with a 22 percent increase, to 24 million unique visitors.
Other sites with a significant increase in unique visitors during the month of December included shipping (21 percent), retail-music (17 percent) and gay and lesbian Web sites (16 percent.)
When it comes to individual Web sites, OfficeMax topped the list for unique-visitor growth in December with a 170 percent increase, fueled mostly by its popular, viral holiday-greeting site Elfyourself.com.
Yahoo Sites continued its reign as the top U.S. Web property in December with about 137 million unique visitors, followed by Google Sites with 133 million and Microsoft Sites with 120 million.
Apple Inc. did well in December, moving up to the No. 10 spot due to interest in the iPod and iPhone as holiday gifts.
Other retail sites that posted big gains in December included Sears, J.C. Penney and Best Buy.
ComScore Inc. measures the digital world based on a global cross-section of more than 2 million consumers who have given the company permission to confidentially capture their browsing and transaction behavior, including online and offline purchasing. ComScore panelists also participate in survey research that captures and integrates their attitudes and intentions.
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Despite the sustained demand for jewelry during the holiday season, an important trend was observed. There was a distinct movement of buyers from gold jewelry towards silver jewelry. This was fuelled by the rapidly rising gold prices. Buyers got great deals as jewelry manufactures turned out hundreds of interesting designs for silver jewelry. Another trend has been the acceptance of synthetic and lab created gem stones. It would be interesting to see whether buyers of gold jewelry would move to other luxury items like, watches, expensive clothes etc.