HITWISE UK RETAIL UPDATE

Poor weather drives shoppers online; Next Sale Creates Storm Online.

London 25th July 2007 - Hitwise, the leading online competitive intelligence service, today reveals that whilst retailers are suffering on the high street, Internet visits are on the rise as UK consumers are avoiding poor weather to shop online. June bore witness to a modest recovery for online retailing, with an increase in Internet visits to retail websites for the first time in five months. Visits to retail websites were down by as much as 5% in April and May, but were up by 2% year-on-year in June. More recently, summer sales have pushed visits up further, by 3% year-on-year in the week to 21st July 2007.

The increase is being fuelled by several retail sub-categories in particular, with visits to Apparel & Accessories websites up 11% year-on-year, Department Stores up 7%, Home & Garden up 7% and Video and Games up 7%.

Next Sale Gains Momentum with Flurry of Online Visits

The day the Next summer sale began, on Saturday 21st July, Next.co.uk climbed to rank 3rd among retail websites, behind eBay UK and Amazon UK and ahead of retail giants Tesco and Argos. Whilst the sale started at the end of the week, traffic to the Next.co.uk website had already doubled from the week before as UK consumers rushed to pick up bargains. Next.co.uk ranked #7 last week among retail sites, up from #14 in the week ending 14th July 2007.

Online enthusiasm for Next's summer sale has been building over the past two years. Share of UK Internet searches for 'next sale' were up 40% year-on-year and have nearly doubled (up 93%) over the past two years.

The search term "next sale" was the highest volume search term that included the keyword "sale" last week and ranked #34 among search terms sending visits to retail websites. Whilst many retailers are running sales, searches for sales from other retailers were far over-shadowed by Next. The second most-searched for retail sale was "boden sale" ranking as the #1218 search term sending visits to retail websites followed by "marks and spencer sale" at #1570.

The Next sale appears to have been promoted via email, with 11% of the site's visits coming from Email Services last week. Shoppers are invited to sign up for advance VIP access to sales on the Next website and Hitwise data reveals an 8% gain year-on-year in the share of visits from Email Services.

About Hitwise:

Hitwise is the leading online competitive intelligence service. Only Hitwise provides its 1,200 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 media enquiries, please contact:

Jannie Cahill
jannie.cahill@hitwise.com

Tel: 020 7378 3619