The typical visitor to a fashion Web site is a female between 25 and 34 years old, with household income in the $60,000-$100,000 range, according to Hitwise, a New York-based online competitive intelligence service. Compared to the average online shopper, visitors to fashion Web sites are slightly younger, more affluent and much more likely to be female.
The top 12 fashion Web sites, ranked by visits for the month of September 2006, accounted for 41% of traffic to all Web sites in Hitwise’s fashion category. Old Navy leads the list with a 7.93% share of total visits, closely followed by Victoria’s Secret with a 7.72% share.
Hitwise is able to track the Web sites that individuals visited before visiting a fashion Web site. In September 2006, some 49% of the traffic to fashion Web sites came from sites in the computer and Internet industry. Drilling down to the subgroup level, search engines (23.9%) were the main source of these visits. Apparel and accessories (15.8%) sites were also a major feeder into fashion Web sites.
Industry average percentages are based on visitor traffic to lifestyle industry Web sites, of which fashion is a subgroup. Comparing upstream sites for the fashion category against the lifestyle industry as a whole brings out certain traits of fashion sites. For instance, the net communities and chat subgroup drove 6.2% of the visits to fashion sites, compared to 17.6% of the visits to lifestyle sites (an 11.4-point differential), perhaps because tighter communities are formed around other, more specialized lifestyle subgroups such as dating, religion and weddings.
On the other hand, search engines accounted for more of the traffic to fashion sites than to lifestyle industry Web sites (a 3.5-point differential). It follows that if net communities are less influential in driving traffic to fashion sites, then visitors must independently (via search engines) find these sites.
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