For the fifth year in a row, Walmart saw the most online traffic on Thanksgiving Day, according to market researcher Experian Hitwise.
Walmart had 14.97 percent of of the traffic among the top 500 most-visited retail web sites on Thursday, up 9 percent from 13.72 percent a year ago. Amazon.com was second with 12.41 percent, up 30 percent from 9.56 percent a year ago. And Best Buy had 6.22 percent of online traffic, up 3 percent from 6.05 percent a year ago.
U.S. visits to the top 500 retail web sites were down 15 percent on Thanksgiving Day in 2009, compared to 2008. The U.S. traffic to Black Friday sites on Thanksgiving Day was down 4 percent from 2008.
Among the top 20 sites visited on Thanksgiving Day 2009, Old Navy saw the largest increase in visits compared to 2008 with a 59 percent increase. Amazon saw a 30 percent increase, and Target saw a 28 percent increase. Facebook received the largest increase in visits from a year ago, with traffic up 671 percent.
According to Internet company Akamai, Thanksgiving Day online retail traffic in the U.S. peaked at 2 pm EST with about 5,732,966 visitors per minute.