UK Internet Users Shopping for Their Children

More than one-third of the Internet users in the UK have children under the age of 15 in their household, according to the UK Internet User Monitor by Fletcher Research, meaning e-tailers have more than 3 million online parents (over age 25) in the UK to target for the holiday season.

Gearing up for the holidays, 65 percent of online parents who shop online made purchases in the month of October. According to Fletcher’s research, Internet parents are bargain hunters that are more likely to choose retailers based on price than online shoppers without children.

Online parents in the UK are also optimistic about increasing their online spending in the next six months, with 61 percent expecting their Internet spending to rise significantly. The interest in making online purchases also goes beyond toys, Fletcher found. Due to the convenience offered by online shopping, Internet parents are enthusiastic about buying a number of goods online.

In order to entice parents to shop online, Internet retailers must ensure secure sites and a variety of products. Almost half of non-buying parents cite security as an issue, and 38 percent say they have not found anything they want to buy online, according to Fletcher.

Concerns about security continue to be a barrier to buying online with 50 percent of the Internet users polled unhappy about giving their credit card details to online vendors. Conversely, Fletcher found only 18 percent of UK Internet users are happy to provide details of their credit cards. However, UK users are increasingly using the Web as a researchtool to make more informed on- and offline purchasing deceisions. The products that have been most heavily investigated online tend to be goods or services that cannot be experienced beforehand. Travel and holidays, books and CDs are popular with both men and women. Computers remain popular, but remain a male dominated domain. Forty percent of hardware buyers are men, Fletcher found, as are 44 percent of software buyers.

According to Fletcher’s Internet Monitor, 60 percent of UK Web users are men, but the male bias is decreasing across all ages. Now the ratio of men:women is only 3:2, down from nearly 2:1 in December of 1998. Significantly, among older Web users over the age of 55, women are increasingly coming online, with women accounting for 33 percent of that age group, up sharply from 19 percent in May of this year.

Fletcher also found differences in the way older and younger users use the Internet. Teenagers far prefer to surf the Web (69 percent prefer it to searching), whereas all age groups over 18 tend to go online in search of specific information. The older they are the more this applies. Regardless of gender, email remains the most popular Internet application in the UK both at home (80 percent of home users) and work (62 percent).