Amazon experienced a 29% surge in unique visitors from September to December, according to data provided by Nielsen, while eBay experienced flat numbers for the last four months of the year. Amazon reached 66.472 million unique visitors in December, up 9% from November and up 8.8% from December 2008.

eBay is currently at 2005 levels in terms of unique visitors after peaking in 2006. As the following chart shows, eBay had topped out at 66.193 million unique visitors in December 2006 and hasn't broken the 60 million mark since August 2007. eBay had 51 million unique visitors to its site in December 2009, down 0.27% from November and down 11% from December 2008.

Amazon's page views increased 29% in December compared to November 2009, and rose 33% year-over-year.

eBay page views decreased 6% in December compared to the previous month, and eBay page views were down 9% compared to December 2008, the third consecutive year-over-year decline in page views for the month of December.

May 2009 has the dubious distinction of being the month with the lowest traffic for eBay in 2009 in terms of page views, and in fact, since we began tracking the metric in January 2005, when eBay had 11.8 million page views.

With eBay set to release earnings on Wednesday, and Amazon.com next week, we'll learn how traffic trends impacted sales.

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