Ranking: Top 50 most-visited retail websites over Christmas

With their wide product range and speedy delivery options, marketplaces dominate the top spots in this golden quarter ranking. It will be no surprise that Amazon comes in first place. Even though this list does not include app traffic, the ecommerce behemoth pulled in close to 90 million visits in the key shopping period before December 25 to its .co.uk site and a further 6.7 million visits from Brits to the US domain Amazon.com. 

In the second spot is eBay, with visits just shy of 50 million, and Etsy takes fourth place with 11.9 million, which moved up to third place in the week commencing December 11. 

Due to eBay’s high proportion of new goods from official sellers, its strong performance does not allow us to draw much of a conclusion about the UK’s propensity to buy second-hand gifts this year. However, the number of visits to other reselling platforms does. Lithuanian-based community buy-and-sell site Vinted brought in 2.8 million visits in the run-up to Christmas – more than Matalan, Schuh and Zara – as shoppers looked to more sustainable and cost-effective gift options and festive fashion. Gumtree also made the list, racking up 4 million views. 

Across the longer pre-Christmas period, in the department store sector, Next and John Lewis were neck-and-neck with traffic, drawing 9 million and 8.8 million visits respectively. However, Next’s ultra-competitive next-day delivery offer cinched it with far more eyeballs in the week before Christmas Eve, where it maintained its spot at number five with 10.1 million and John Lewis dropped to eighth place with 7.8 million visits. 

Although no longer maintaining a presence on the high street, Debenhams put in a strong enough performance online to break into the top 25, consistently delivering between 3 million and 3.7 million visits in each period.

The most visited retail sites in the UK for Christmas shopping

Boots’ bumper Black Friday performance is well illustrated, with the health and beauty retailer bringing in 6.4 million visits, putting it in between Asda and Tesco, and eleventh on the list overall. Demand softened as it got closer to Christmas, however, and the retailer dropped two places. 

Things shift considerably after Christmas Day through to New Year’s Eve when the bulk of retailers will have launched their Boxing Day and January Sales. As expected, furniture and homeware retailers moved up several places post-Christmas, with Dunelm entering the top 10 at eight, up from 18th in the weeks prior, and Ikea moving from 37th to 26th.

The week following December 24 also saw a new entrant to the marketplace sector with Temu entering the top 10. This is likely to be somewhat driven by shoppers feeling the post-Christmas pinch and looking for heavily discounted goods. Fellow Chinese pureplay Shein did not see the same uplift, dropping ten places to 36th after Christmas.