Online shopping less popular with Australians

The web might be world wide, but that doesn’t mean there are not differences between the browsing habits of Australians compared to people in other parts of the world.

Online shopping is the most obvious area of difference. According to data collected by Hitwise, visits to shopping classified sites accounted for 5.93% of Australian online visitor numbers for the week ending 9 February 2008, significantly less than the 9.54% in the US and 9.61% in Britain.

In fact, Australia was the only country out of the three where social networking took the single biggest share of web visits – 8%. Social networking was also popular in the US and Britain but, with 9.18% and 7.615 respectively, ranked behind shopping site visits in each of those countries.

But while we spend less time looking for bargains we appear to spend more time getting informed – news and media sites accounted for 6.75% of visits for the week ending 9 February, well above 3.97% in the US and 4.63% in Britain.

In terms of particular content categories, bank websites were the most popular on 4.53% market share, ahead of software on 3.86%, education and reference on 2.63% share, and travel on 2.56%.