eBay is Australia’s top shopping website but OzBargain’s community forum is the fastest growing
More Australians than ever are shopping online, but not all websites in the category are seeing their visitor numbers grow, Roy Morgan Research shows. There are online stores and auctioneers, aggregators, price-checkers, catalogue-cataloguers, and group buying websites—but it’s a wiki for bargain-hunters that’s drawing in the crowds.
7.8 million Australians (14+) visited eBay in an average four weeks in the 12 months to June 2016—more than double its nearest competitor Amazon (3.8 million). Kogan.com and Groupon reach just over 1.3 million visitors each
Scoopon and Catch Of The Day are each nudging the million-a-month mark, but hot on their heels (and gaining ground) is a very different type of shopping website: OzBargain, a wiki forum for visitors to share and vote on everything from online voucher codes, bricks-and-mortar retail store sales, supermarket specials, mobile phone and entertainment streaming plans, credit cards, flight deals, freebies and competitions.
Founded and still run by a Sydneysider named ‘scotty’, OzBargain is Australia’s fastest-growing shopping-related website, now with 948,000 unique monthly visitors—more than 2.5 times as many as in 2012.
Number of visitors to Shopping Websites
Sources: Roy Morgan Single Source Australia, July 2015 – June 2016 n = 50,712 Australians 14+
Over the last few years, OzBargain has successively eclipsed many of the more traditional category players (as far as any online retail model can yet be called ‘traditional’), that variously offer aggregation, auctions, group buying, and actual online stores.
Shopping websites reaching a mid-tier audience include MyShopping (789,000), GetPrice (616,000), Living Social (604,000), DealsDirect.com.au (545,000), Grays Online (521,000) and Cudo (469,000), with smaller visitor numbers to Deals.com.au, Google Shopping, Lasoo and Spreets.
Michele Levine, CEO – Roy Morgan Research, says:
“8.3 million Australians now buy something over the internet in an average four weeks, a gain of 37%, or around 2.25 million online shoppers since 2012. However many shopping websites haven’t seen visitation rise in line with the overall appetite for buying online.
“The two ‘category killers’ eBay and Amazon have each increased their unique monthly audience over the period, by around 5% and 17% respectively—both well shy of the 37% growth in online shopping generally.
“The big success over the last few years has been OzBargain, a community message board for like-minded bargain-hunters. The site doesn’t sell anything directly and instead acts as a hub for visitors (and merchants) to share information about sales and offers, whether online or in bricks-and-mortar stores.
“Nearly half of Australians agree they sometimes research products online but then go buy them offline, and the success of OzBargain’s platform proves that many consumers are deeply engaged in omni-channel shopping.
“Where once we thought about traditional retailers needing to learn from the online upstarts, the flat or declining visitation to many of these shopping websites suggests that these former ‘disruptors’ could now learn a thing or two from their elder brethren about how to satisfy customers, how to advertise through a range of media, and how to entice new passers-by through the door—or to the webpage.”
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Margin of Error
The margin of error to be allowed for in any estimate depends mainly on the number of interviews on which it is based. Margin of error gives indications of the likely range within which estimates would be 95% likely to fall, expressed as the number of percentage points above or below the actual estimate. Allowance for design effects (such as stratification and weighting) should be made as appropriate.
| Sample Size | Percentage Estimate |
| 40% – 60% | 25% or 75% | 10% or 90% | 5% or 95% | |
| 1,000 | ±3.0 | ±2.7 | ±1.9 | ±1.3 |
| 5,000 | ±1.4 | ±1.2 | ±0.8 | ±0.6 |
| 7,500 | ±1.1 | ±1.0 | ±0.7 | ±0.5 |
| 10,000 | ±1.0 | ±0.9 | ±0.6 | ±0.4 |
| 20,000 | ±0.7 | ±0.6 | ±0.4 | ±0.3 |
| 50,000 | ±0.4 | ±0.4 | ±0.3 | ±0.2 |
