Are rising prices driving online shopping?

Realised we hadn't mentioned anything about credit crunches or rising fuel prices on the blog (well it's summer, we've got better things to think about like flying ant days and playground games), so thought I would remedy this with a positive little story about how rising prices might actually be driving online sales. Online sales have been rising steadily since forever, and it must be difficult to separate the many factors that contribute to this, but it seems that some clever people think that we might be using online shopping to avoid travel costs (like fuel), or to avoid overspending on shopping trips. Read the full article at e-consultancy here - it also links to a great article by Lorraine Paterson about how to improve eCommerce sites from a usability point of view.

By Kate Wooding
Published: 25 July 2008
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The rise and rise of mobile sites

There's an article in this week's NMA about how 60% of consumers think it's important to be able to access the internet from their mobile, and 65% of those who are planning to buy a phone in the next year will be looking for a good mobile internet experience. Surely the iPhone and Twitter are partly responsible for this rise?? There are a couple of things this means for the digital industry - firstly we'll all need to make sure that the sites we build are easily 'readable' on mobiles and secondly more brands are demanding mobile-specific sites - sites built specifically for mobile access. Will it be restricted to certain sectors? The NMA article suggests that banks, sport, travel, social networking, local amenities/guides and ticket purchasing would all benefit - and having mobile access to Wikipedia would settle a few pub arguments - and make pub quizzes a cinch!

By Kate Wooding
Published: 19 June 2008
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Christmas Spending

It's now that time of year when we all look at our bank accounts and wonder how much we actually spend over the festive period. If your anything like me the answer is too much!

The British Retail Consortium reported that UK retailers recorded their worst December figures since 2004. However, online retailers have had a more successful Christmas as reported by e-consultancy.com.

Figures from the UK show that 4.4 million people spent a total of £84 million on Christmas Day, 269% more than last year with an average of £19.09 per person. While in the US £14.9 billion was spent in December up 19% on last year.

By Alan Masterson
Published: 10 January 2008
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UK online ad spend predicted to rise 25% to top £2.5bn in 07

This year will see UK online ad revenues surpass £2.5bn, according to the latest forecast by Opera Media.

The healthy state of the industry will reportedly continue, with predictions of online revenues increasing by 25% during 2007. This rise will see online, which stood at 12.3% of the total advertising market in 2006, account for 15% in 2007.

Within online advertising, search is continuing to make massive gains. It now accounts for 58% of the UK's total online spend.

Google continues to be the main driver behind search, with an 80% share of the search market. Its nearest competitor is Yahoo! with 8%.

The mobile ad sector has potential to generate further revenue, with 54% of mobile owners accessing the internet every week via their phone.

(Source: NMA magazine)

By Melanie Russell
Published: 11 September 2007
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Women love the web

The internet is becoming increasingly indispensable for women, with over two thirds (66.1%) saying their lives would be disrupted if they had to go without the web for a week.

A study of 1,800 women aged 25 and over found four out of five females go online between 7am and midnight.

A majority of those aged over 65 go online before 7am. A third of women say they use the net during normal hours for primarily personal use, but that climbs to 52% between 4pm and 7pm, when one in 10 women go online for family-related content, and to 70.8% between 7pm and midnight.

In a finding that will pique the interests of marketers who have long targeted the spending power of women, who are seen as controlling the purse strings in many family homes, 54.5% of females said the internet is their primary resources on products they are considering purchasing, beating family and friends (10.9 percent), newspapers and magazines (9.9 %), TV (5.8%), brochures (5.1%) and radio (1.3%).

And some 51.4 % of women of all age groups used the web to do shopping in the last year, mostly for travel (37.5 percent), adult clothing (32.4 percent), health and beauty products (27%), children's clothing (18.8%), financial products (15 %) and groceries (14.9 %).

Some 43.6% of women said their daily routine would be "significantly" impacted upon if the internet were removed from their lives.

Source : Burst Media

By Melanie Russell
Published: 31 July 2007
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Web Trends 2007

Information Architects Japan have released an update to their very interesting Web Trends map of 2007. Based on a representation of the Tokyo Metro map the 200 most successful websites are ordered by category, proximity, success, popularity and perspective to create an interesting image.

While the focus is still on English language websites (because that is where it's at), we have added some Japanese sites (a mystery to most of you gaijin), some German sites (yeah, there are some popular ones) and a Chinese line (the second Internet)"

Each trend line follows a theme, e.g. the technology line has the tech sites, the design line the design sites. You can download the map in various formats and even use the interactive version as your browser startpage. 

By Tom Beddard
Published: 20 July 2007
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