United Kingdom: growth of online audience in department stores 2020

Retailers today are in a tight competition not just for greater sales and market shares, but for consumer attention online as well. In May 2020, among UK’s many department store retailers, Argos reached an online audience of 17.6 million adult visitors from from desktop browsing, desktop video streams, smartphone browsing & apps, and table browsing & apps. In that month, this department store attracted 1.3 million unique online visitors more compared to April 2020.

Argos: faithfully online

Argos’s leadership position in online audiences should come as no surprise, since the company has ranked as the top multichannel company in 2020. Now part of the supermarket chain Sainsbury’s plc, Argos is a catalogue retailer with displays of its products available both online and in physical stores, of which there are currently 882.

Drama in the department store

The UK has a quite packed market of department stores, but some of them have been struggling for a while. House of Fraser is one of them, which was bought of by retail giant Sports Direct after going into administration. Sports Direct also had bids to add another department store Debenhams into its inventory of high street staples, but the department store retailer was taken over by its lenders instead.