E-tail statistics hide more than they tell

By CHRIS BARTON

With the demise of FlyingPig, here are two questions for New Zealand online retailers. Is it worth bothering to sell goods online? And, are you tired of the pig jokes yet?

To answer the first question, we need to know whether New Zealanders actually do shop online.

According to NetRatings - which draws its data from a panel of 3000 home internet users - they do, but mostly abroad.

In September, Amazon.com got 70,000 individual visitors from New Zealand and nearly 10,000 went to the "confirm order" page, indicating that they were buying.

So why is the local online buying picture so grim?

NetRatings says the top New Zealand site in September was Xtra's online shop portal (http://xtramsn.co.nz/shopping), which shows 26,779 visitors.

But after that not a single online shop - neither on the Xtra site nor anywhere else in New Zealand - breaks the threshold of 40 visitors from the 3000 panel members required for meaningful NetRatings statistics.

In other words, fewer than 40 of NetRatings' panel of 3000 surfers have visited any of our e-tailers.

Okay, we're a small country, so let's extrapolate from unofficial NetRatings data for sites receiving 20 or more visitors from the panel.

Using this small sample, you may be surprised to know that Ticketek (www.ticketek.co.nz) gets 20,700 visitors a month - but we don't know how many are buying tickets rather than just just seeking information.

Fashionz (www.fashionz.co.nz) gets an estimated 17,540 visitors - but we know most are just looking because the site doesn't have much online buying. The same may be said for Village Cinemas (www.village.co.nz), which gets a theoretical 16,530 visitors - but again the number doesn't tell us who is buying. Judging by Hoyts Cinemas (www.hoyts.co.nz) statistics (13,968), most moviegoers pay at the door - Hoyts' site doesn't offer online buying.

Dick Smith Electronics (www.dse.co.nz) does pretty well (16,414), followed by Liquor King (13,229) - now unusually re-branded as Shop Naked (www.shopnaked.co.nz). Next comes the poor little pig (www.flyingpig.co.nz) with 12,351.

Perhaps surprisingly, Woolworths (www.woolworths.co.nz) - a site where quite a lot of shopping occurs - registers at only 9000 or so.

The news doesn't get a lot better with Hitwise stats. Its method is to measure visits which it tracks through 150,000 users via internet service providers.

It is criticised by some because its sample doesn't represent the large internet providers such as Xtra and Clearnet.

As a result, it comes up with a slightly different view of the New Zealand net world - seeing eBay, for example, as a more popular overseas destination than Amazon.

But when it comes to local shopping sites, Hitwise puts Dick Smith in the number seven rank in its Shopping and Classifieds category. That makes it the second-most-visited retail site after Gamezone (gamezone.co.nz) at number six.

But Hitwise's insistence on giving rankings and percentages and no actual numbers tends to make its statistics meaningless.

Great to see Ezibuy (www.ezibuy.co.nz) has come from the 20th to 10th rank this month and now has 1.31 per cent market share.

But 1.31 per cent of what? Apparently of the 2.81 per cent of all internet traffic that accounts for the Hitwise Shopping and Classifieds category.

Confused? Well that's a pretty small percentage compared with the 14 per cent of New Zealanders who like to visit adult sites or the 20 per cent who go to search engines.

But it still begs the question - percentage of what? The 150,000? No the measure is of site visits, not users.

It's at about this time that any sane person will run screaming for the door.

But the direct approach to e-tailers gets about the same level of gobbledegook.

I ask Woolworths if it can share some numbers about its success story. No it can't. Why not? Because its owners say so.

So are they profitable? "It works for us," is as good as I get.

In August last year, Woolworths was only slightly more forthcoming, saying its site was "a multimillion-dollar operation" and the number of registered customers was "in the tens of thousands".

Information on FlyingPig was similarly scant. The most recent - coming on the day it was shot down from local skies - was that it had monthly sales of about $100,000. Was that profitable? I guess not.

There are three general conclusions to draw from all this: the local e-tail market, despite the hype, is still very small; internet statistics are woefully inadequate to really tell us what is going on; and local e-tailers are a sorry and secretive bunch.

But it needn't be that way. All e-tailers could easily supply audited information about their site visitors and monthly online sales.

Far too often that's not given because the e-tailers say they don't want give up competitive advantage.

What they really mean is that hardly anyone is visiting, growth is stagnant, sales are measly, and profit will only occur when pigs do indeed fly.

* Prove me wrong, reveal your e-tail numbers - contact chris_barton@nzherald.co.nz