What Is The ShopLocal Index?

Posted on 1 July 2008 by Loch Rose No Comments

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The ShopLocal Index is the advertising industry’s first market indicator designed to track the influence of the Internet on in-store shopping. The Index, updated monthly, is based on an average of 20 million monthly consumer visits to store promotions that are presented on the sites of 50 major U.S. retailers. These retailers cover major retail segments such as Computers, Consumer Electronics, Office Supplies, Home Improvement, Department Stores, Mass Merchants, Grocery, Drug and various specialty stores. For the first six months of 2008, The Index showed a growth in the average number of page views of in-store promotions on major retailer sites to 33 percent from last year.

The ShopLocal Index is based on hundreds of millions of aggregated monthly page views and initially benchmarked at 100 for January 2006. The ShopLocal Index was up 29% in June 2008 year-over-year, with 245 million individual page views and 20 million consumer visits to retailers’ Web sites. Food and drug category showed the largest growth with a healthy 47% rise from last year. The home and garden category had the slowest growth, showing a dismal 17 percent rise for June. This is consistent with the retail sales slowdown in the month for this shopping area.

Shoppers’ use of the Internet for in-store shopping grew 29% in June 2008

The Internet’s impact on multi-channel shopping is a rapidly growing phenomenon, according to Forrester Research. The company estimates that a quarter of all retail sales (over 500 billion) are directly or indirectly influenced by the Web.¹ Additionally, Forrester predicts that online-influenced, offline sales will eclipse $1 trillion in 2012, accounting for nearly half of all retail sales.

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