Britain’s internet shoppers parted with an average of £1,175 last year, according to the latest Ofcom figures.
The £158 increase is up 16 per cent on the 2011 spend of £1,017 and underscores the growing trend away from the High Street toward online shopping and home delivery.
It also puts UK consumers ahead of shoppers in the five others countries surveyed in the watchdog’s annual International Communications Market Report which showed we spend more than double the average per head spend than shoppers in France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the United States.
Ofcom’s research — based on data supplied by IMRG the industry association for online retail sites — also suggested that UK online shoppers have greater confidence in the security of the sites they buy from and the credit card companies they use to pay for their purchases.
The UK also benefits from cheaper access to mobile phones, landline and broadband services with the proportion of household income spent on communication deals in the UK at 2.3 per cent, compared to 2.5 per cent in the US and 3.4 per cent in Germany.
“Consumers in Britain are benefiting from one of the world’s most price competitive marketplaces for communications,” commented Ofcom’s director of research, James Thickett.
“Telecoms bills have been falling in real terms in the UK for the past ten years. However, consumers are not just benefiting from cheaper deals, they are also getting much more for less, as the quality and range of telecoms services has expanded hugely in that time.”
In a parallel study the Nottingham-based Centre for Retail Research has been comparing e-commerce businesses across ten European countries with their US counterparts.
On this side of the Atlantic it found online retailers in only three countries — the UK, Germany and France — accounted for 71 per cent of all European online sales, with Britain clocking up 12.7 per cent of the market share. Second was Germany at 10 per cent, closely followed by Switzerland at 9.9 per cent. Italy accounted for just 1.6 per cent of internet sales.
“Retail e-commerce sales grew weakly during 2012 and the expected increase in market share did not occur,” the centre reports. “We expect the annual rate of growth of online retailing in the UK to slow down to somewhere around 10 per cent, although elsewhere in Europe it should grow by an average of 14 to 16 per cent.”
Unlike Europe, internet shopping in America suffered badly during the financial crisis. “As the country that taught us all how to do online sales and once had annual sales growth of more than 25 per cent, online retail sales in the US have a market share somewhere around 9 per cent,” CRR researchers said. “Taking into account the different sizes of Europe and the US online trade shares are about the same in both regions.”
It also warns that e-commerce statistics can be problematic. There are difficulties in determining online sales from abroad, because foreign firms may not wish to comply with the UK statistical authorities. There are also issues about whether to include mail order when it is mainly online and how to account for partial online ordering such as click and collect.
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