Europe's women flock to the web

21-12-2004

by Deirdre McArdle

Online shopping in Europe is continuing to grow at an exponential rate, with women in particular taking to e-commerce sites.

That's according to a new report from Forrester Research called "The 2004 European Online Retail Consumer," which shows that the number of people shopping online in Europe has increased by 50 percent in the past year.

Matching their reputation in the "real world," the Forrester report found that European women are now the driving force behind the sharp growth in e-shopping in Europe. The report shows that 27.4 million women are now buying products online compared to 17 million just two years ago. In total approximately 60 million European men and women shop online.

Some 32 million consumers in the 25 to 44 age group shop online in Europe, representing over half the total figure. This is down primarily to the number of people in this demographic who have access to and feel comfortable using the internet on a daily basis.

Two-thirds of European online shoppers are based in the UK and Germany. "The UK sets the pace for the rest of Europe it will generate EUR14 billion in 2004 -- more than a third of total European online retail -- and will grow its e-commerce revenues to EUR40 billion by 2009. The UK has closely followed US e-commerce and has overtaken the pioneers in some cases. At EUR442, the UK's net retail spend per online capita is almost at parity with that of the US," Reineke Reitsma, author of the Forrester report, told ElectricNews.Net.

The average profile of an online shopper differs between Northern and Southern Europe. Whilst tech-savvy young consumers are still the typical internet shoppers in countries like Spain and Italy, online shopping in Northern Europe has become slightly more representative of mainstream consumers in that the it has ceased to be a male dominated domain according to the report.

Offline retail outlets could soon feel the impact of this growth in online shopping, in fact some product categories such as event tickets, consumer electronics and leisure travel are already feeling the pinch.

"While 55 percent of online clothing shoppers also bought clothes from a shop, just 16 percent of online event ticket buyers also bought tickets from a physical location," according to Reitsma.

High street shops are still the most important retail channel, according to Reitsma, but multi-channel buying is continuing to grow and sooner or later offline stores will be affected by this.