Ferrit.co.nz makes strong debut

Ferrit.co.nz makes strong debut

AUCKLAND; December 13th, 2005: The launch of online shopping directory, Ferrit.co.nz has had a successful debut in New Zealand, as indicated by Hitwise, the world’s leading online competitive intelligence service. Ferrit.co.nz ranked as the 6th most popular website in the Shopping & Classifieds – Rewards & Directories category for the week ending December 3, 2005 with 2.75% market share, ahead of a number of well-established global websites, including Yahoo! Shopping, Bizrate.com and DealTime.com.

Ferrit.co.nz, powered by Telecom, allows users to search for products across a range of categories with the ability to specify geographic region. Users can link directly to the e-commerce page on the retailer’s website, or add products to their own comparison pick-list.

Hitwise Clickstream data show that Trade Me (www.trademe.co.nz) referred the most upstream traffic to Ferrit.co.nz with 16.7% for the week ending December 3, 2005, indicating experienced online shoppers were quick to cross-reference their bids against the service on Ferrit.co.nz. Media-driven traffic was more prominent during the week ending December 10, 2005, with the majority of traffic to Ferrit.co.nz received from The New Zealand Herald (www.nzherald.co.nz) and xtramsn (xtramsn.co.nz).

SmileCity New Zealand (www.smilecity.co.nz), which offers a rewards program for reading email, filling out surveys and shopping, continued to hold the dominant market share in the category with 25.8% for the week ending December 10, 2005. Fly Buys NZ (www.flybuys.co.nz) ranked as the second most popular local website, confirming that offline rewards programs generate significant interest online.

Online shopping visits by New Zealand Internet users to Shopping & Classifieds websites are significantly higher this year with an increase of 26% comparing weeks ending December 10, 2005 and December 11, 2004. Bricks and mortar brands featured prominently in the Top 20 search terms to online Shopping & Classifieds, including ‘dick smith’, ‘noel leeming’ and ‘harvey norman’, for the 24 weeks ending December 10, 2005.

About Hitwise:

Hitwise is the world's leading online competitive intelligence service. Each day, Hitwise monitors how more than 25 million Internet users interact with over 500,000 websites across 160 industry categories.

By monitoring more people, more websites, more often, Hitwise provides marketers with timely and actionable marketing insights on how their online presence compares to competitive websites. Companies use this information to maximise the return on their online investment, in efforts such as search marketing, affiliate programs, online advertising, visitor segmentation, content development and lead generation.

Hitwise collects Internet usage information via a combination of ISP data partnerships and opt-in panels, and complies with local and international privacy legislation as audited by PricewaterhouseCoopers. Founded in 1997, Hitwise is a privately held company, headquartered in New York City and operates in the US, UK, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong and Singapore.

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