UK Users Remain Hesitant to Shop Online

While 30 percent of the UK’s 15 million Internet users came online in 1999, a high proportion still have reservations about making purchases online, according to the UK Internet User Monitor™ from Fletcher Research.

Less than one-third of UK Internet users have made an online purchase, with 64 percent of men and 80 percent of women yet to make an online purchases, the research found. The biggest barrier to online shopping continues to be security concerns. Fifty percent of those polled are unhappy about giving their credit card details to online vendors. Only 18 percent of UK Internet users are happy to provide their credit card details.

UK users are increasingly using the Web as a research tool to make more informed on and offline purchasing decisions, according to Fletcher. The products most investigated online are items that cannot be experienced beforehand. Travel, books, and CDs are popular choices for both men and women, while computers remain a popular but male-dominated domain. Forty percent of computer hardware buyers are men, as re 44 percent of software buyers.

Overall, Fletcher found that 60 percent of UK Web users are men, but the male bias is decreasing across all ages. The gender ratio now sits at 3:2, down from nearly 2:1 in December of 1998. Among older Web users (over age 55), women are increasingly coming online, accounting for 33 percent of that age group, up sharply from a mere 19 percent in May of 1999.

There are marked differences in the way older and younger users use the Internet, Fletcher found. Teenagers prefer to surf the Web (69 percent prefer surfing to searching), whereas as all age groups over 18 go online to search for specific information. The older the users are, the more likely they are to search for specific information. Regardless of users’ genders, email is the most popular online activity for both those with home (80 percent) and work (62 percent) Internet access.

Of the 15 million UK adults with Internet access, Fletcher found 11.2 million are regular users, 76 percent use it at least once a week. The majority of users are younger than the national average. The average age of UK Internet users is 35, much younger than the adult population as a whole. Nine percent are 55 or older (against 31 percent of total population), and 8.3 percent are under 18 (against 5 percent of the population as a whole).

Other findings from Fletcher’s Internet User Monitor include:

• By 2003, Fletcher expects the UK to have 24.5 million adult Internet users, 18 million of which will be regular users
• 40 percent of UK Web users have a degree compared with the national average of 12 percent
• The average household income (per month, after tax) is around 36,000 GBP against an average of 20,000
• 79 percent of Web users live in the ABC1 demographic, and 24 percent live in London
• 59 percent of Web users have clicked on an ad, and 34 percent say Internet advertising is irritating. UK users do prefer online classifieds to newspaper classifieds, however.