the state of e-commerce

First, a big picture snapshot: online shopping continues to grow at a healthy pace in the US (and most likely to be the same over here in europe), with a 25% increase in spendings compared to last year! A few extracts:

Newbie online shoppers tend to cling to the familiar. They are 81 percent more likely than experienced shoppers to shop only at sites they've shopped at in the past.

As a related point, the growth in online spending is fueled by more transactions per user, as opposed to more total users.

Moral of the story: if an e-commerce site wants to get in front of eager shoppers, it needs to be highly visible in search engines.

Not surprisingly, broadband users are far more likely to shop online: while households with narrowband connection spent an average of $217 per quarter online, households with broadband spent $311, or 43 percent more.

The number of sites that shoppers visit before making a purchase is rising, according to comScore. In the apparel segment, using 2002 as the base year for comparison, total number of sites visited increased 2 percent in 2003, 11 percent in 2004, and 21 percent in 2005.

As to why shoppers shop online, most survey respondents listed "convenience" as the main reason. Note that the following three reasons, "compare price," "window shop" and "lower price," are essentially the same thing: Online shoppers are aggressively looking for a good deal.

if consumers continue to increase the use of search engines, whether Web searches or product search engines, that trend opens up the marketplace to those who specialize in one product to deliver a price advantage.