E-commerce giant eBay sees a massive amount of searches every day—the company just announced that it handled more than 2 billion U.S. product searches in the third quarter alone. For the same time period, comScore reports that Amazon saw 847 million searches, while Google handled only 226 million product searches. Similar to the fact that top Google searches can show what’s trending during a specific time, eBay’s searches can show us what is popular in terms of e-commerce at a given time.
The company has releases data on the top product searches on the marketplace during the holiday shopping season (Dec. 1 through Dec. 22). During the time period, the top three products that saw the largest spike in searches (in order) are the Nintendo Wii Console, Xbox Kinect, and “Ugly Christmas Sweater.”
These were followed by Skullcandy Headphones, American Girl Dolls, Sons of Anarchy (TV show), North Face Jacket, Sony Cybershot, Nintendo DSi and Laptop computers.
The fact that the Kinect and Wii are at the top of the list isn’t particularly surprising. comScore just reported that online spending for consumer electronics is currently up 22 percent this holiday season. I think it’s safe to assume that searches for Ugly Christmas Sweaters are likely to go down in the next few days.
