M&S online store visitors up by 1m

Marks & Spencer online saw 1 million extra visitors go to its website in October, according to the latest figures from internet tracking firm ComScore. According to reports, www.marksandspencer.com increased its unique users from 3.7

million visits to its website in September to 4.7 million unique in October.

The 4.7 million users spent 55 billion minutes on the site, which gave M&S an 11% share of the total visits across all the retailers included in the analysis.

David Walmsley, director of multichannel development at M&S, said it had been focusing on its online marketing and increasing its reach via new channels such as its in-store touch screen service Style Online. “Customers are increasingly shopping with us via a range of different channels, in-store, online and on their mobile devices,” he said.

Rival John Lewis received a boost in users, with 300,000 more visitors in October – taking the department store chain’s total visitor numbers to 3.3 million.

Fellow department store chain Debenhams still lagged behind John Lewis with 3.2 million unique users to its site in the same month, despite a 500,000 surge in unique user visits.

Simon Forster, director of Debenhams.com, said Debenhams had recently rolled out in-store kiosks to all its stores to “give customers the option of ordering items out of stock, in their size, or have items delivered directly to their home”.

The figures showed that Matalan jumped two places, above Littlewoods and House of Fraser, to become the fourth most-visited store site on ComScore’s list in October. Unique users at Matalan.co.uk climbed from 1.5 million to 1.7 million month on month.

Image: M&S AW11 campaign