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The research firm Jupiter MMXI said on Thursday that almost 33 million Europeans in December 2001 used the Internet to do their Christmas shopping. During the period Germany and the UK together saw around 19 million unique visitors to retail Web sites.
Jupiter analyst Patricia Lueer said that according to the company's estimates, the Christmas period was worth around EUR2.9 billion to European on-line retailers, a massive 71 percent from the previous year.
"The challenge for retailers is to keep customers loyal by staying in touch with them and convincing them to keep using their sites," she said. "Retailers cannot afford to rest on the success of Christmas."
The traditional products of books, music and software showed the heaviest sales, and in Germany the UK and France, Amazon.com now reaches more than 10 percent of the Internet population. But Jupiter noted that clothing is also becoming a strong seller on-line: in the UK both Johnlewis.com and Marksandspencer.com made it into the top 10 list of retailers during the month.
The shopping figures from Jupiter are based on the behaviour of panels of shoppers totalling some 50,000 people in eight European countries: Denmark, Italy, Germany, Spain, France, the UK, Switzerland and Norway. Jupiter's new parent company, Nielsen//NetRatings, does maintain a panel of surfers in Ireland, but the merger of the companies was not complete when the Jupiter research was carried out.
For Ireland Jupiter has released projections for the total amount it estimates was spent on-line by Internet users in 2001: some EUR59 million, more than double the sum of EUR26 million spent on-line in 2000. Jupiter says that typically up to 30 percent of the total annual on-line spend in a country comes during the Christmas period.
Other reports also indicate good growth for on-line shopping in Ireland. The Irish on-line retailer Buy4Now told ElectricNews.Net earlier this month that doubled its sales and the number of visitors to its site in the last quarter of 2001. The company, which is one of Ireland's largest e-tailers, now expects to reach profitability in first quarter of 2002.
While much of the growth since 2000 can be attributed to an overall jump in the number of people using the Internet, Jupiter points out that audiences to retail Web sites are actually growing faster than the increase in the overall Internet population across Europe.
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