People Do More of Online Shopping in Europe but Still Less than Last Year

Today comScore has reported some interesting statistics on the situation with online retail sites in Europe (three countries covered - UK, Germany, and France) and the news is not particularly encouraging. The thing is that comScore reports that the holiday season did bring more visitors to online shopping properties - but still not enough to say this year we are having a good Christmas shopping season really as last year’s traffic was higher anyway (and significantly higher at that).

To perform the survey, comScore evaluated total numbers of visitors to the leading online shopping sites every week in November and compared it to the pre-season months of September and October along with the same period from last year.

The results of the survey show that European consumers have already entered the holiday shopping period craziness with traffic to e-commerce sites growing everywhere in November (by 10% in the UK, 11% in Germany and by 6% in France where the holiday shopping season usually starts later anyway) compared to the previous, non-holiday months.

But while this information may sound optimistic, we should not forget another point here and that one is more than disappointing: the thing is that all the online shopping sites are now experiencing decline in European visitors compared to previous years.

The most pitiful situation is in the UK where online retailers lost 10% of visitors year-on-year. For example, eBay traffic dropped by 20%, Amazon lost 21% while Tesco Stores had 28% less visitors this year than they had in November of the previous year. In Germany e-commerce also saw an impressive decrease in visitors by 7% - even despite of the highest traffic growth in November compared to previous, non-holiday months. But this is not surprising given the fact that in Germany eBay traffic dropped by impressive 18%, Amazon by 15%, and Otto by 10%. The situation is somewhat better in France where online retailers only had 2% less visitors in November 2008 compared to the same period of 2007 with some sites even gaining traffic: for example, while eBay lost 3%, Apple managed to increase its traffic by 7%.

So it is evident that consumers do realize that they need to get some holiday season shopping done anyway but with tighter budgets they are very cautious about actually doing it. Of course there is still some time before Christmas where people will probably indulge in busier shopping activities but given the current economic situation it is not particularly likely as people tend to stick to only spending money on absolute necessities - and nothing else whenever possible. So definitely no surprise here and I would not even be surprised if the existing traffic increase is largely due to people mostly comparing hunting for the best deals and not actually buying.

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