Tuesday - September 26, 2000

Online College Bookstore Traffic Falters in August

Overall traffic to online college bookstores fell in August in comparison with their big season last January, according to a study released today by PC Data Online. The analysis also revealed that women are evolving as the online niche's primary users.

A review of Internet audience measurement data revealed that bigwords.com drew 804,000 unique users in August to efollett.com's 748,000 during the same month. These results compare with bigwords.com's 1.4 million unique users and efollett.com's 757,000 unique users in January.

Other major college bookstore sites also saw dips in traffic from January: varsitybooks.com had 562,000 unique users in August compared with 1.1 unique users; ecampus.com had 426,000 unique users in August compared with 1.3; and textbooks.com had 97,000 in August compared with 332,000 in January.

Meanwhile a study of demographics of the top five sites showed that women comprised 57 percent of the traffic to the site.

"Selling college books on the web is competitive, and the key to survival may lie in the sites' ability to broaden their off-semester strategies," said Jeff Moulton, analyst for PC Data Online. "Several sites have already begun to aggressively adjust their content to adapt to the growing numbers of women attracted to this niche."

Aside from the emergence of women as a new demographic, the study also predictably showed the largest block of online visitors were 24 years of age and younger (59 percent).

"About 38 percent of its visitors to online college books sites were between 25 and 54 years of age. But 17 percent were over 45 years of age," Moulton said. "This strongly suggests that parents are playing an active role in the shopping for college text books and could grow into a secondary market audience."

The traffic and demographic data was derived from online activity of PC Data Online's panel of over 120,000 home Internet users.

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