Gift, food sites are hot in Japan

Japanese consumers are increasingly turning to the Internet for gift ideas and shopping. According to a new report from metrics firm comScore, gifting sites were a huge boon to etailers because of Japanese consumers in February. Retail-Food websites were also big gainers for the month.

by Kristina Knight

“Valentine’s Day has traditionally been celebrated in Japan with the women giving men gifts, especially chocolates, a practice that is slightly different from other parts of the world,” said Maru Sato, Managing Director of comScore Japan. “As a result, traffic to retail-food sites saw a sharp increase for the month as people took advantage of the convenience of online shopping and ordering.”

Retail-Food sites were the top gaining properties, increasing 19% from 1.6 million to nearly 2 million unique users. Next was Fragrance/Cosmetics sites (13% increase to 4.6 million uniques), followed by Lotto/Sweepstakes sites (13% increase to nearly 2 million unique users). Rounding out the top five gaining categories were Government sites (9% increase) and Career sites (8% increase).

Overall, the top three website properties were Yahoo (42 million unique users), Google (33.2 million uniques) and Rakuten Inc. (29.4 million uniques). However, the top gaining properties showed a huge increase for Mozilla Organization websites (2.7 million users, 37% increase) and CookPad.com (2.9 million unique users, 33% increase). Also gaining ground on the most-visited websites were Nissan (30% increase), UTAMAP.com (23% increase) and ORICON.CO.JP (16% increase).