posted on August 9, 2006 09:36:22 PM
While by no means exact, the Alexa comps for Amazon & eBay Traffic seem to be in lock step.
The first(1 below) is for daily reach per million but the trends are much the same for traffic and page rank.The chart represents reach from 10/05-07/06.
The second (2 below)is a three year comparison, again for daily reach per million.
Apart from the seasonal decline, its interesting to see how in lock-step the two are as the preeminent e-commerce portals.
(1)
(2)
Best,
Michael
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[ edited by pandorasbox on Aug 9, 2006 09:38 PM ]
posted on August 9, 2006 09:52:53 PM
That makes me long for some really comprehensive surveying to find out why that is the case. Say, 5000 randomly-selected Internet users. You can't draw any conclusions until you talk to people. Maybe it's the same set of people visiting both sites, maybe not.
In the sessions I've had with eBay I've never been asked what other sites I visit.
posted on August 10, 2006 12:21:32 AM
Good points Fluff;
I've not seen any publicly available analysis re customer overlap...
It would be interesting indeed but competitively, a cold day in hell before it would ever be released.
I think this all might just represent the limits of size, even on the internet and why ultimately, the future of the net is search, semantic search and indexing, the very sort of research that Google spends and spends and spends upon.
Amazon & eBay are up against the inefficiencies of search within their respective sites...and ultimately this is the great barrier.
The efficiency of these two sites is a function of search, IMO. And search is a human metric far more subtle than mere variety or options.
When I consult for businesses, I like to point out that the hesitancy everyone experiences as they ponder what exactly to enter in the search box, how to best describe what it is they're trying to find, the scant physical distance between the fingers and the keyboard, is the what the game is really all about.
posted on August 10, 2006 03:46:39 PM
What this says to me is that buying is truly a seasonal activity, and the hunches we sellers have about good and bad times to list are pretty accurate.
posted on August 10, 2006 09:07:17 PM
<<I've not seen any publicly available analysis re customer overlap...
It would be interesting indeed but competitively, a cold day in hell before it would ever be released.>>
The data presented above was most likely not obtained by random interviews, polls or opinion surveys. It was obtained from user's computers infected by the Alexa spyware program that tracked their web visits and transmitted them back into a database. Alexa is one of the first spyware programs a scanner will look for during a scan. the interesting thing about this program is that there is a legetimate Alexa key created in the registry when IE is installed. It points to a spot at Microsoft which redirects to a search engine. Many spyware programs will mistakenly remove this key and the spyware will remain. It would be interesting to hear Alexa.com explain how they obtained those figures.
If Murphy's law is correct, everything East of the San Andreas Fault will slide into the Atlantic
