Fleishman-Hillard Inc. and Harris Interactive have published an excellent study about the influence the internet has on modern consumers. Their “Digital Life Index Study” highlights the main aspect of the modern shopping behaviours and compares the different impacts between the UK, Germany and France. The four key findings of the report are worth reading up on:
You should read the article, which you can find here.
Kinset has developed a 3D Store technology that combines the virtual shopping with the real-time experience.
With Kinset, shops can be designed, tailored and created according to your needs in 3D and the shopper can stroll around, wander through the aisles and can use the power of the web to get information about a product that the shopper is interested in.
The retailer can decide on the look, feel and layout of the shop and analyze shopping behavior through tracking technology, on how the shopper has moved around in the virtual shop, etc. The retailer can change shop designs to optimise sales and can even use it as testing module for the real world.
This takes virtual worlds like Secondlife to the next commercial level and combines the best of the real and e-commerce world. We will see how users react and adopt this new way of shopping.
The e-commerce is currently growing rapidly. By 2011, it should triple and Sales Volume should reach 320 billion EUR. The main players in this market are United Kingdom, Germany and France respectively which represent approximately 70% of the European online sales. E-business is however the most dominant in the United Kingdom (60 billion generated this year). This can be explained by their different way of life. English people are said to be great spenders in comparison to Germans and French.
This growth should extend rather quickly and cover a big part of Europe. Have a look here at the entire article concerning figures of the market.
The craze of Internet users to purchase online continues to grow. The number of deals realized by e-commerce reached EUR 28.8 millions in 2007, which means a rise of 37% in one year.
Similarly 63% of the Internet users had already done a purchase in the second quarter 2007.
We notice a rise of 22% of the number of Internet buyers in 2007. This phenomenon can be explained by a bigger trust of the Internet users concerning the use of this sale’s channel (+20% in one year). Moreover, online buyers are mainly young people between 20 and 40 years old, whereas people older than 50 years are still reluctant to this way of shopping.
It is a sector which evolves very quickly because of the immediacy of the act. We are more easily facing to a logic of impulsive buying. Additionally the intent to purchase increased by 35% in 2007 in comparison to the previous year.
Find here all the information and all the statistics on this subject.
For e-commercants it is frustrating to know that people have gone into the new age of comparing products and services “online” and navigate like experts through special offers and shops however when it comes to the actual purchase the majority still prefer to purchase the item in a real shop.
Conservative or natural?
I think that this is very natural and it is time for the e-commerce sites, portals and shops alike, to unite the two worlds better and that goes beyond having a print-ready format of the product on the site. The idea seems old-school that shoppers then need to go into the shop and hand over the printed product sheet as price proof to bargain. Perhaps we all want the product information on the phone in the form of a SMS, blackberry message, note, and I don’t know what?
There is a lot of room for improvement and Mediaplex, part of the Valueclick group, are attempting in understanding better this “online-offline” relationship by having customer-card related tracking services but is this all there can be?
Are European merchants ready to be confronted with the transparency of comparative search engines to match prices, like in Australia where many shops guarantee to beat advertised prices from competitors? Have Europeans finally travelled enough to become open to the idea of bargaining as much as they do on their holidays (many occidentals claim to be bargaining experts when on holiday but why don’t they do it at home?)
I have spent some years in countries where bargaining is part of the culture and everyday life and I think that the momentum of the mass to bargain has not been outsourced to its limit. Why can’t we mobilize the mass to reset the prices? Flashmob and MediaMarkt give you an idea of where my thoughts are headed.
Here you can view the complete video of the interview, that taken during the OMD 2007 in Düsseldorf. I am looking forward to hearing your comments.
Yesterday and today, Emmanuel and me are at the OMD 2007 Media and Marketing Fair in Düsseldorf. Everybody of the German Marketing and Advertising scene is represented at this fair so it is a great opportunity to meet all the companies, potential partners and representatives of our competitors alike.
The potential is amazing and therefore we are more than keen to soon launch and be part of this thriving e-commerce movement of new media. We can identify interesting shifts in the news, media and marketing industry as the market is moving on from the old ways of thinking into the new e-generation. One sentence summarizes our blackberry generation: “We have reached a time, where people are willing to send intangible cyber-gifts and even pay for this”.
One highlight, at least for us, was my interview with the Julius Endert from Handelsblatt.com, the most influential business newspaper in Germany, who also act as main sponsor for the OMD. Check out the video in the Handelsblatt Video Page. You will soon be able to find the translated script here on our blog.
Hope to see you at the OMD.
The 4th edition of the E-Commerce Convention took place in Paris last week. The team of LetsBuyIt spent quite some time among the conferences and different stands, each one according to their dedicated subjects: referencing, payment systems, affiliation as well as performance technologies.
It is a great environment of news but above all a great occasion to have a good vision on the actual needs of the “e-commercials”, thanks to the interventions of the users/clients themselves!
In these kind of lounges, it is not always obvious to choose, which conference to participate in: among the subjects and the speakers, the managers that take one hour to advertise their business and those that really add value to concrete problems, the choice is not always easy and the result is not always the best! 
But we acknowledge that the majority of content that we worked with was of very very good quality, and above all very instructive for us who relaunch and who have a lot of questions about a lot of problems!
We will also be in Berlin at the beginning of November, which also has a great reputation, but we will talk to you about this in more detail later!
This week we would like to highlight the interesting concept of a company that pays for the reviews of items: ShopperO.com. A German start-up from Hamburg has created a system of financial remuneration for reviews instead of only being thanked for with an email, rewarded with discounts or never-to-be-redeemed-vouchers.
They have come up with two payment methods as stated on their website:
“Every Shoppero gets 20% of the revenues from the review pages and 60% of the revenues from page hits tracing back to adgets or links.”
The definition of revenue is not very clear however if you could enlighten me, please feel free! I like the idea and this will enhance the speed of web-marketing development.
You’ve compared feature lists and read all the consumer reviews. You’ve narrowed your choices to one or two models. Now you wonder: Who carries this product near me? Is it on sale?
You’ll find the answers at Krillion, but that’s for the US.
Krillion is the leader in actionable local search; local search that results in consumers taking action to buy. Krillion’s mission is to transform the way ready-to-buy consumers find and buy national brands, locally. Based on its unique Krillion Localization Engine, Krillion search results are more accurate than any local search information available on the Internet. Krillion, founded in February 2006, is funded by Hummer Winblad Venture Partners.
You have a similar service for the UK with Ask The Local.
What about the rest of Europe?
Of course LetsBuyIt studied this trend closely … stay tuned 
