EBay still dominates online shopping in Australia

Australian consumers largely prefer to use international online marketplaces, despite increasing investment by local retailers in the space, according to new data from discounts platform CupoNation.

According to the data, four out of the top five most visited retail websites in Australia were dominated by international and domestic offers by US-based retailers eBay and Amazon.

EBay Australia was the most used retail website in Australia during the period between January and March 2019, with 194.9 million users, while its global site brought in another 36.6 million users.

Amazon’s global site outpaced its local offering, with the US site enjoying 58.1 million users in Australia over the period, compared with 35.5 million who utilised the Australian variant.

Sitting in between these four online-only offerings, hardware chain Bunnings brought in the most users of any Australian-owned retailer – with 41.26 million users utilising its online platform, 65 per cent of which utilised mobile to do so.

“We want to rush slowly into this,” Bunnings managing director Michael Schneider previously told, regarding the hardware chain’s comparatively late adoption of online retail.

“There’s no hard date or obligation… We just want to be a great place customers choose to shop at, and we recognise that customers have more choice than ever before, but selling online is just one string in a bow.”

The next most visited websites were Woolworths, which saw 33.7 million users over the period, Coles, which saw 22.5 million, Jb Hi-Fi (29.1 million), Kmart (22.4 million), and Kogan (20.9 million).

CupoNation collected this data through SimilarWeb and Alexa tools, compiling traffic information from the period between January and March 2019. The number of visits represented in the data is not tied to unique users, meaning a user can have use a site multiple times and it will count as multiple visits.