Boohoo vs Asos smackdown

17th Nov '15 by snickers

21 comments 16953 reads

There's much disappointment about the lack of an article on BooHoo today, so I'm going to step in. Prepare to be further underwhelmed.

I'm wanted to see how BOO compared to Asos subsequent to the launch of Boo's app, and you can get the data to do this: a moving average of web traffic from alexa.com and app downloads from appannie.com. I only have the data they give away free. Alexa have just changed their measurement scheme, so that cuts this sequence off.. But for what it's worth, here are 2 graphs..

The app launches in early August and its ranking settles at 400, and now hovers at 300. But the points are on a broad diagonal, so any changes in BOO's download rate are matched by changes to Asos's.The colour of the line is the ratio of web traffic - light blue means BOO are stealing ground. BOO had a bit of a relative surge in October.

Here are the global web traffic ranks. Again the 2 sites generally move in tandem. There's only a few percentage points movement in any case. The web rank is a 3 month rolling average so, if access to the store goes via an app and bypasses the web you'd expect Boo's traffic to fall as the 3-months starts to cover the period in which the app has been available. On the other hand I understand app purchases incur extra costs from Apple. Swings & roundabouts.

Hope that helps. What, no????

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Paul Scott

18th Nov '15

I don't understand the article, or the graphs I'm afraid!

Any chance you could simplify it & explain the main points in layman's terms?

P.

Glaws2

I'm equally mystified and would be grateful for the one syllable explanation :)

Edward Croft

Snickers - I have no idea what you are on about - but I LOVE it !

e.g. What does BooAppUK rank mean? Is higher better or lower better ? i.e. is a bottom right mark on the top right a win for BOO or a win for ASC ?

PhilHofGrowYourDough

The Alexa rank is a rank of websites by traffic (visits from individuals). Here's a list of the top 5 (with estimated number of monthly visits in brackets) ...

An old favourite still hanging at number 5 ... Yahoo.com (750,000,000)
Little china girl getting some attention at number 4 .... baidu.com (no figures)
Cat & dog videos as popular as ever at number 3 .... youtube.com (900,000,000)
Our favourite social media website at number 2 .... facebook.com (1,000,000,000)
And at number 1, everyone's favourite search engine ... google.com (1,100,000,000)

Join us next week pop pickers when you'll find that the only likely change is that yahoo.com will be replaced by amazon.com

------

I think it's misleading to plot the rankings from one company against another. ASOS has an Alexa rank of 490 and Boo an alexa rank of 4400 but this could in fact mean that there is an exponentially different number of visitors as in my experience the number of visits increases exponentially as you move up the leaderboard.

Not sure if that helps you :-)

Regards
Phil

P.S. Stocko has a rank of 89,276 (up 5,747 places in the last 3 months, whilst my website get so little traffic it isn't even listed.

Tom Firth

As the man himself is silent, my interpretation is as follows:

Y axis is the number of views for ASOS and X axis is the number of views for BooHoo. A point in the top right indicates a lot of views for both and a point in the bottom left indicates few views for both. Therefore, a trend from top right to bottom left indicates that views for both have been declining more or less in tandem.

Following the dates on the line suggests that this is indeed the trend being observed. At the same time, however, the colour of the line is the ratio between the two figures, with BooHoo views as the numerator. So if BooHoo views are high relative to ASOS, then the colour will be pink and degrade towards blue as the equation balances a little.

So, on the app graph, we see the line starting as pink as traffic was very high in the first few days that BooHoo released their App. Fairly quickly the line heads back towards blue though as by September time the initial surge in interest had died off and the distribution of views between the two was a little more even.

Note that the scales are different on each, the second graph shows a range of around 4.2 to 4.4k for BooHoo and for ASOS around 450 to 500. So while the plots tell us about the trends in terms of relative views, they axes also show quite clearly that in absolute terms BooHoo is getting many more views. Around 9x as many for web traffic and a bit under 2x as many for app traffic.

Sound abut right Snickers?

Tom

EDIT: Just saw Phil's comment - didn't realise that those numbers are ranks, not views, despite the post referring to ranks. So that means that the absolute numbers are in favour of ASOS by the proportions stated above (which makes more sense) but that the trend is slowly moving in favour of BooHoo.

Also it means that on the app release date there was relatively little interest for BooHoo's App, but that it quickly gained some momentum!

Attraction Investor

These are easy to understand.

The 1st is a frog chasing a butterfly

Th 2nd is a mouse fishing, with a dove carrying an olive branch

Which both mean Boohoo are good.

AlanJenkins2

Yahoo is hanging on because Java makes Yahoo your search engine whenever you update Java unless you are careful to un-tick the box :-[ .

Hi Tom,

To say the website traffic is moving in favour of Boo is in my opinion not a valid conclusion to draw from the Alexa rankings. It might take 1000 extra visits for Boo to move up the rankings by ten places but it might take 10,000 extra visits for ASOS to move up it's rankings. They could both be increasing site visits at the same rate but Boo could be climbing the rankings and ASOS could be static.

I hope that helps
Phil

Hey Phil - yes I agree with that, exellent point about the exponential increase in traffic as you move up the leader board. My confusion was in part caused by me misinterpreting the figures as traffic figures initially and only realising they were ranks after.

I can say only that the rankings are moving in favour of BooHoo then! I agree that is not possible to infer anything about actual traffic numbers from the graphs.

Tom

Just to be clear the way to interpret the Alexa ranking chart is that you'd want your stock to be driving towards #1 (bottom left in the chart) as this would mean it would get more website visits than Google.

Best of luck with that :-)

snickers

Tom Firth knows.
Thanks for the other comments too. The bottom line here was that Boo havent taken an obvious bite out of asos since the app launched. Not very helpful i know. Although as i said Boo's computers are now, i suppose, being accessed via both app and web, so for BOO over these 3 months, a flat web rank actually could mean growing business
It's totally getting into the weeds i realise.

I think a much better way to interpret this data is ...

ASOS have a massive competitive advantage in terms of their traffic and BOO have a lot of work ahead of them to get their traffic up to or even close to ASOS.

This link which compares traffic to ASOS and Boo might help you ...

http://www.similarweb.com/website/asos.com?competitors=boohoo.com

I know from own attempts to drive traffic to my website that it is a very difficult thing to do.

So to summarise that data ...

In the [edit] last month ~~six months~~ ...

ASOS had ~~on average per month~~ 26.4m visits whilst Boo had 4.3m

On average visitors have spent 8.51 minutes on ASOS sites, whilst 9.57 minutes on Boo

ASOS visitors on average viewed 16.38 pages, whilst they viewed 13.1 on Boo

And the bounce rate (the rate at which a person leaves a site straight away after searching for something, e.g. "little black dress") was 26% for ASOS and 23% for Boo (the lower the better)

The traffic graph seems to suggest that Boo is pretty consistent in terms of traffic but if anything ASOS has been gently increasing traffic with a sharp rise in October ... changing weather perhaps?

I hope that helps

Phil

Thanks for that link - not seen that site before and it looks great!

Lots of interesting stats on there. ASOS with approximately 6x as many views as BOO, a large gap indeed. People spend, on average, a minute longer on BOO vs ASOS, yet only visit 13.1 pages on ASOS vs 16.38 pages at ASOS.

So either each page on BOO is more captivating somehow (less likely...), or BOO's site takes longer to nagivate through than ASOS's (more likely...). I certainly appreciate a quick browsing experience for that kind of thing so it's an interesting point to me. Lower bounce rate for BOO though which is a positive.

Tom

garbetklb

Tom

It would be easy to interpret the dwell time differently - no idea if correct!

I imagine that if you're interested in an item you'll spend more time on the page, whereas if you don't like something, you'll move on faster.

Maybe the bottom line is that without more info, it's difficult to draw too many conclusions? Stuff like : Loading speed, how customisation data (eg size/colour) is shown (and how it would be counted), numbers of pictures to browse through etc.

And do either of the companies have any differently branded websites? Or do any White Labelling?

But I'd be v interested to see how "Traffic sources" evolves over time - presumably it would say something about brand recognition, acquisition cost etc

If ASOS is UK No 2 clothing website, who's top? Next?

Andy

If ASOS is UK No 2 clothing website, who's top? Next?

H & M!

Correction.

H & M for US, Next for UK

1 Next.co.uk
2 Asos.com
3 Newlook.com
4 Hm.com
5 Boohoo.com
6 Topshop.com
7 Zara.com
8 Riverisland.com
9 Missguided.co.uk
10 Matalan.co.uk

Top 10 for UK clothes shopping!

andrewdb

Number of browsers in a shop does not necessarily translate to a number or value of sales.

This is a good method of comparing Yahoo and Google - or any site where revenue is driven by advertising
- where eyeballs really are proportional to income.

vv pretty graph though.

Rusty2

19th Nov '15

My reply got lost somewhere so briefly, ASOS is approx. 7x the size of Boohoo so these figures are in line with my expectations. I think Boohoo has more room to grow, also their margins are higher, Asos net profits are only 3.5x Boohoos. I sold out of Asos and bought Boohoo some months ago when the shareprice was around 25p. Traffic is all well and good but end of day its sales and margins that count.

Boohoo vs Asos smackdown

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Snickers

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