PlusOne – Marketing Musings » Online purchasing growth

I was reading an interesting article in the emarketer newsletter this morning about the growth of online shopping.

If you are targeting US consumers online then the news is good for you:

The Pew Internet & American Life Project’s latest online shopping study, conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates in August and September 2007, found that two-thirds of online Americans have purchased a product online at least once.

The number of US consumers who have purchased online more than doubled from 22% in June 2000 to 49% in September 2007.

Pew said that number extrapolated to 66% of Americans with Internet access having bought something online.

But what about Europe? The willingness of internet users to buy online varies widely”

In a study released this month, Eurostat found that 30% of consumers in the EU27 had made at least one purchase online. But the numbers ranged from 10% for Italy to more than 50% for the UK and Scandinavian countries.

Without delving into the Eurostat report, one wonders if this has to do as much with language issues as internet accessibility.

Interestingly the Neilsen company research indicates that a whopping 90% of internet users are also online purchasers. This is an amazingly high figure, when their own research shows that in some parts of the world, just 67% of users have purchased online as this graph shows.

One aspect the newsletter report does highlight is that most online purchasers have access to broadband.

This need is easily recognised with the proliferation of shopping sites with underlying java scripts and other code that even at broadband speeds can make page loading a slow process.

For me this also places into doubt the 90% claimed by Neilsen. Broadband penetration in many regions is still low – take Australia for example where even some urban areas still struggle to find a broadband access point.

Which brings to mind another aspect of online purchasing – mobile web use.

Mobile web access using mobile phones is growing at an exponential rate – businesses with the product types to offer effective browsing via a mobile screen could see online purchasing rates go through the roof.