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Overall spending dropped by USD700 million in June from a total of USD3.9 billion in May. The number of households shopping on-line dropped to 13.1 million in June, from 14.8 million in May of this year.
Consumers spent an average of USD245 per person in June, down from USD265 in May. Forrester said the figures showed that the softening US economy was finally taking its toll on Web shopping.
This is in contrast with the increase in on-line sales from USD3.5 billion in March, to USD4.3 billion in April. Around 15.6 million people shopped on-line in April of this year. US consumers spent an average of USD273 per person in April compared with USD263 in March.
Consumer spending has continued to hold strong in the US despite the economic downturn and many economists have seen it as the sole positive point in a depressed US economy.
In Europe, Forrester said while retailers fear that media reports of dying dotcoms will erode demand for on-line shopping, the data coming from the continent indicates a different trend. The company said during the last six months of 2000, as dotcoms crashed, the share of Europeans on-line grew by 20 percent from the previous six months to 32 percent of the population who are over 16 years old.
In the UK and Germany, the percentage of consumers on-line reached 40 percent and 39 percent respectively. Forrester said the longer people are on-line, the more goods they will buy.
European consumers in their first 12 months on-line spent on average EUR134 on their last on-line purchase, those on-line for 13 to 24 months spent EUR150 and on-line shoppers with more than 24 months experience spent EUR176.
Irish on-line spending has been limited by the still small proportion of the population with access to the Internet at home.
The latest figures from Forrester compare to the US Census Department, which reported that e-commerce sales in the first quarter of 2000 were USD7 billion, up 33.5 percent from that same quarter a year earlier. However, the bureau estimates that the first quarter of 2001 was down from USD8.67 billion that it estimated for the forth quarter of 2000, a decrease of 19.3 percent.
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