Getting to an online retail storefront doesn't always involve going straight to the front door, as many people depend on the traffic cops of search to point them in the right direction.

That direction from the major search engines would be upstream, as 25 percent of traffic received by over 19,000 retailers starts with a query in a search box. MarketWatch's Bambi Francisco cited Bill Tancer of Hitwise, who noted this in an interview.



"Even big-brand retailers rely on search engines for traffic," Francisco said. "About 12% of Wal-Mart.com traffic visited Google first, according to Hitwise."



Keep in mind that Wal-Mart's website staggered under the traffic from Thanksgiving holiday visitors. It may be the search traffic that pushed their powerful infrastructure to the point of boiling into slag.



The observations Tancer made indicate why search has become so competitive, why Yahoo has been feverishly updating its search marketing products, and why Microsoft has joined the paid search game with its adCenter product. Internet users depend on search, and retailers depend on that traffic.



Social networks have become jumping-off points for people to get to a retailer site. Hitwise found that five percent of the upstream traffic to online businesses arrived from a social network.



Out of that five percent, MySpace accounted for 2.5 percent.



Email has been much maligned due to the overwhelming spam problems experienced by people around the globe. But in the US, email drives more traffic to retailers than social networks do, almost doubling that by moving nine percent of upstream visits to them.



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Tags: Search Engines, Online Retail



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