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UK ecommerce accounts for 19% of total retail, making it worth $233bn

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The total value of the UK B2C ecommerce market is calculated to be around $233bn and has grown at 11% year on year between 2018 and 2019. Ecommerce now accounts for 19% of total retail spend. Mobile has a 55% share of this.

Lumping together all consumer goods, there are 59.90 million people purchasing online in 2019 in the UK alone, spending $78.90bn – giving retailers an average revenue per shoppers of $1326, which is 3.1% of UK total ARPU.

So finds the UK specific Digital 2020 report from Hootsuite and WeAreSocial, which measured everything you can think of around consumers digital lives from how and where they shop, to what they watch and how impacted they are by advertising.

Of the 90% of UK internet users who have visited an online store, 38% of shoppers have made a purchase using a smartphone or tablet, compared to 54% using a laptop of desktop computer.

Additionally, in the UK, 63% of mobile web users are regularly shopping with apps. This compares with 83% using chat apps and 82% on social media apps. 23% have used their mobile to scan a QR code.

Breaking this down, online shoppers on all devices are spending $23.39bn on fashion and beauty, $15.14bn on electronics and physical media and $13.56bn on food and personal care. These are, however, dwarfed by the $54.04bn spent on travel and accommodation.

The fastest growing online shopping categories are food and personal care (8.9%), furniture and appliances (7.5%) and fashion and beauty (7.0%).

56% of payments on ecommerce sites are made by credit card and 25% from ewallets, says the study. Interestingly 7% of spend is with cash. Of the digital spending, 63.5 million people have spent $162bn using digital payments of one sort or another – an average of $2552 per spender.

The lion’s share of traffic from UK devices heads to Google, YouTube and Facebook – however, Amazon and eBay are both in the top ten with monthly traffic levels of 350,200,000 and 240,700,000 hits per month respectively. The BBC gets 471,500,000, higher than Twitter.

Google, by comparison, is getting 2,941,000,000, but Amazon is the sixth highest search term entered into Google, finds the study.

As a result, search engines are the where most people (41%) discover new brands, with TV advertising still strong in second place at 36%. Word of mouth is the third most likely place people hear of new things (35%). Retailer websites and brand and product sites are also strong (33 and 21% respectively), ahead of social media advertising (19%).

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