UK consumers become more ‘online-shopping’ confident
UK consumers are becoming more confident with using e-commerce to buy goods and services, according to research by the UK European Consumer Centre.
A study of the latest consumer complaint figures by the UK ECC this year (2010) shows that online purchasing is being used by more and more people who ask the UK ECC for advice and support over their disputes with traders elsewhere in Europe.
Complaints involving e-commerce as the selling method rose by 18.5% from 2008 to 2009 for the first five months of the year. They also went up by three per cent for the same period from 2009 to 2010.
Jed Mayatt, UK European Consumer Centre (UK ECC) Manager, said: “It’s uplifting to know that UK consumers appear to be taking the e-commerce revolution on board.”
The study is backed up by a recent (2009) European Commission report on cross-border consumer e-commerce. The European e-commerce market was estimated to be worth 106 billion euros in 2006 and in 2008 51% of EU retailers sold online. In the UK in 2008, 57% of people had ordered goods or services over the internet for private use in the previous year.
Jed said: “This recent European Commission report showed that online shopping is hugely popular in countries such as the UK, France and Germany. UK consumers appear to be taking advantage of the potential that e-commerce has for reshaping the European internal market with regard to price and product-related comparisons.”
The internet is said to be the fastest growing retail channel, according to the EC report. On the downside, 60% of cross-border internet shopping orders could not be completed by consumers because the trader did not ship the product to their country or did not offer adequate means for cross-border payment.
Jed said: “Our complaint figures show that UK consumers are buying a whole range of goods and services online. It’s clear that the internet has expanded the size of the market from which consumers purchase: it gives them access to more providers and more choice. Consumers are able to compare products, suppliers and prices on an unprecedented scale.
“But not everything is plain sailing for UK consumers who dip their toes into the e-commerce water or even those who are more experienced at online shopping. We handle a variety of complaints – from travel and transport (flights/car hire) and holiday-related (apartments/hotels) through to electrical goods (sat nav/PCs) and miscellaneous items such as a skydiving suit, jewellery or a table.
“Some complaints are fairly basic, others are more complex. We’re here to give advice and support to any UK consumer who’s in dispute with a trader elsewhere in Europe, whether they’ve bought gone online shopping, used an internet auction or not.”
