Kiwis Flock to both Indoor and Outdoor Shopping Websites

House & Garden and Sports & Fitness Fast Moving Retail Categories

New Zealand - 28 October, 2008 - Hitwise announced today that online retailers in the New Zealand House & Garden and Sports & Fitness industries enjoyed substantial growth of 55.1% and 35.2% respectively against all websites in September 2008 compared to September 2007, according to Hitwise New Zealand. Leading players in these sectors are well placed to take advantage of the fast approaching Christmas shopping period.

The top website in the online House & Garden industry was Mitre 10 New Zealand (www.mitre10.co.nz), which accounted for 9.35% market share of visits in September 2008. Mitre 10 New Zealand grew its share of the House & Garden industry by 61.7% year on year in September 2008. Specialty websites around baby furnishings and wear featured prominently amongst the top 10 websites, including The Baby Factory (www.babyfactory.co.nz), Baby Universe (www.babyuniverse.co.nz) and Babycity.co.nz (www.babycity.co.nz). Other leading House & Garden websites included Bunnings Warehouse New Zealand (www.bunnings.co.nz) with 2.74% share of visits and Briscoes Homeware (www.briscoes.co.nz) with 2.37% share.

In the Sports & Fitness industry, Torpedo7.com a retailer for biking gear, dominated with 14.86% share of visits in September 2008, representing a 3-fold increase from the same time last year. Leading bricks and mortar brands also had a strong presence online with Rebel Sport New Zealand (www.rebelsport.co.nz), Adidas (www.adidas.com) and Nike (www.nike.com) featuring amongst the top 5 websites.

New Zealand Visits to House & Garden and Sports & Fitness

As economic conditions tighten, consumers hit the web to maximise their discretionary spend. Vouchermate, a website where companies display downloadable vouchers for discounts on their goods and services, has risen quickly in online usage in New Zealand. The New Zealand based website increase more than 4-fold between weeks ending 5 July 2008 and 11 October 2008, and ranked at fourth position in the Hitwise Shopping & Classifieds - Rewards & Directories category, week ending 11 October 2008. Search Terms driving traffic to Vouchermate were primarily brand-oriented, with 'voucher mate' accounting for 16.6% of clicks (search resulting in a visit) for the 24 weeks ending 11 October 2008; highlighting the strength of the Vouchermate brand amongst New Zealand consumers.

New Zealand Share of Visits to Vouchermate

Hitwise is the leading online competitive intelligence service. Only Hitwise provides its 1,500 clients around the world with daily insights on how their customers interact with a broad range of competitive websites, and how their competitors use different tactics to attract online customers.

Since 1997, Hitwise has pioneered a unique, network-based approach to Internet measurement. Through relationships with ISPs around the world, Hitwise's patented methodology anonymously captures the online usage, search and conversion behavior of 25 million Internet users. This unprecedented volume of Internet usage data is seamlessly integrated into an easy to use, web-based service, designed to help marketers better plan, implement and report on a range of online marketing programs.

Hitwise, a subsidiary of Experian (FTS: EXPN) www.experiangroup.com operates in the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong and Singapore. More information about Hitwise is available at www.hitwise.com.

For up to date analysis of online trends, please visit the Hitwise Intelligence-Analyst Weblogs at http://weblogs.hitwise.com and the Hitwise Data Center at www.hitwise.com/datacenter.

For more information please email press.au@hitwise.com or contact Rheika Tompkins on +61 (0)3 8530 2400.