North America used to lead the way in e-commerce sales, but today Western Europe is the leader. According to a recent study conducted by Collins Stewart, the UK is leading the way and is currently the “most mature” market in all of Western Europe; however other countries are increasing their contribution to the overall market within the region. The study also showed that Europe will continue its dominance in the market at least through 2012, reaching a threshold of $200 billion. Attaining your share of this revenue is really as simple as fine tuning your payment options and speaking with experts on how you should succeed in this undertaking.
An analyst at eMarketer.com also stated that the population of shoppers that make purchases online in the Western Europe has risen steadily in the last few years. However, she noted, there are definite key differences in the various markets throughout the region.
These differences are marked by generations of differences between the behaviors and infrastructures between Northern and Southern Europe. For example, consumers in Germany and France have a much higher online sales and overall e-commerce activity than users in Spain and Italy, where e-commerce is still just a mere fraction of overall sales. In Germany, online purchases comprised 6.9% of the total retail sales volume in 2009, yet Italy had less than one percent, in at 0.8% of their total sales volume.
Unfortunately, the global economic downturn has made differences between countries in Western Europe even more diverse. For example, in the UK, France and Germany, e-commerce sales were already an established part of the economy well before the recession became a factor. This helped to encourage shoppers that were looking for discounts or deals to turn to the Internet for budget pricing. However, because e-commerce didn’t have a chance to really penetrate the retail markets in other countries such as Italy and Spain; consumers still don’t have a lot of confidence in e-commerce shopping. Did you know that you can bill non-card holding online customers in UK, France and Germany with Webbilling.com direct debit?
The data suggests that online retailers trying to tap into smaller European markets might want to focus on encouraging sales and increasing consumer confidence in smaller countries. Spain is a good choice, as the overall e-commerce sales figures are low, but over two-thirds of the country did purchase something online between July 2008 and July 2009. Webbilling.com also bills Spain through direct debit, so add the capability to your credit card options and capture more joins from the same traffic.
Please contact me for information on billing Europe – tap my network and let’s generate more revenue for you. Contact JoeD at: traffic at giant sense dot com .
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