UK buyers top EU rankings for online shopping
The UK is the most active country in Europe for shopping online, with the sector becoming increasingly important to Britain’s retailers, according to official figures released yesterday.
More than three quarters of UK residents said that they had bought items online in 2013. Britain was tied only with Denmark, with the joint-highest rates of internet shopping in the European Union.
The EU average was significantly lower, with fewer than half of Euro – peans purchasing items online during the period. In countries such as Greece and Portugal, only around a quarter of shoppers used the inter net, according to Eurostat figures published by the Office for National Statistics.
However, large companies are still most likely to benefit from e-commerce. In 2012, nearly half of firms with more than 1,000 employees made online sales, in comparison to fewer than a fifth of businesses with between 10 and 49 employees. The proportion of the UK’s businesses where at least one per cent of sales was from e-commerce is yet to reach 20 per cent.
Ofcom, the UK’s telecommunications regulator, also released their latest report on the state of the sector yesterday.
The major survey showed that the number of adults in the country with internet access at home rose to 82 per cent in the first quarter of the year, up by two percentage points.
However, the figure drops to 50 per cent when only adults over the age of 65 are taken into account. For over- 75s, the proportion drops to one third.
The report also shows the rapid growth and increasing importance of mobile advertising. Spending on mobile advertising nearly doubled between 2012 and 2013, up from £528.5m to £1bn during just 12 months.