While UK Internet visits to Hitwise's shopping and classifieds category increased by just 0.9% last week, the ‘traditional' high street department store websites including John Lewis, Debenhams and Littlewoods experienced a 21% increase.
Hitwise said larger high street names experienced their first big increases in traffic since Christmas.
Argos is the most popular high street retailer online, but Debenhams saw the largest increase in visits - up by 45.3% - last week. Next, Marks & Spencer and Littlewoods also saw significant increases.
‘Next sale' was the most popular of all the 96,000 terms containing the word ‘sale' that were searched for in the UK.
Between the weeks ending 21 March and 28 March, UK Internet searches for ‘Next Sale' increased 12-fold, while the terms ‘Marks and Spencer sale' rose five-fold.
Searches for the basic term ‘sales' also doubled, with Littlewoods and Debenhams picking up the most traffic.
Analyst Robin Goad said while Littlewoods paid for most its traffic from the term, Debenhams relied exclusively on organic search traffic.
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