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E-tail study: Male shoppers outnumber female

By Edmund Mander

Unlike at the mall, male shoppers vastly outnumber women in the world of Internet shopping, especially in Europe and Asia.

That is one of the “significant surprises” to emerge from a recent global survey of Web shopping conducted by London-based Healey & Baker, the international real estate services firm owned by Cushman & Wakefield, according to authors of the 85-page report titled “Global E-tailing.”

Among Web shoppers as a whole, 65% are male, but the predominance of men to women in the retail ether rises to 77% among Asian Web shoppers, and 75% in Europe, according to the report. In the Americas, the sexes are more fairly balanced, with male shoppers at 55%.

“I think a lot of it does come down to time and convenience,” said Yvonne Court, head of retail research and consulting at Healey & Baker, explaining that a lot of men who have neither the time nor inclination to go shopping in physical stores do it over the Internet.

Male shoppers are especially dominant in the older age groups, representing 71% of the shoppers among those over 65. But even among the under 25s, they outnumber women by 12%. The study found that 83% of Web shoppers between age 55 and 64 accessed the Internet almost every day, compared with 75% of 25- to 34-year-olds.

The sex imbalance among Web users in Europe and Asia may also be because Internet shopping is not as advanced in those continents as it is in the United States, Court said.

“In the States, and in Canada possibly, I think the Web has taken off more quickly in capturing people’s imaginations,” she said. There are fewer online retailers serving Europe and Japan, and people there also are less confident about credit card security, she said. More than half of all Web shoppers said they were worried about payment security, according to the survey.

In other findings, retailers who sell online estimate that the proportion of their sales made over the Internet will quadruple within five years, the report said.

“The research shows that regular Internet shoppers, retailers and distribution companies alike are clearly of the view that buying online is set to take off across all three continents over the next few years,” said John Strachan, head of retail and leisure at Healey & Baker, in a news release announcing the report.

But that should not disturb conventional retailers, he added.

“The growth of e-tailing is not the death knell of the retail property market as we know it, rather it provides opportunities to get the fundamentals of retailing right.”

“A lot of people won’t use the Internet because they enjoy going out shopping,” Court told SCT. “Secondly, people want the immediacy; they don’t want to wait [for their merchandise].”

To be successful, Internet retailers must make their sites easy to find and navigate, Court cautioned. The biggest problems identified by Web shoppers over 65 were finding and navigating the right site, and sites crashing, according to the survey; those under 24 years old complained mostly about the unavailability of products.

The study also revealed:

• 83% of products bought online are delivered successfully at the first attempt, and 99% arrived by the second attempt.
• Books are the most common item bought over the Web (64% overall), followed by CDs (59% overall). Clothing ranks low, at 34% overall.
• Only 17% of Web shoppers do their shopping at work, 2% do it from a laptop while on the move; 80% shop at home.
• Food and groceries were bought online by 13% of European Web shoppers, compared with only 5% in the Americas, and 10% in Asia. The purchase of electrical goods online is especially popular with Europeans, 29% of whom have bought such products.

The survey, which was carried out by London-based Simpson Carpenter, a joint venture with the MORI polling company, surveyed shoppers in France, Germany, Sweden, Britain, Brazil, Canada, Mexico, the United States, Hong Kong, India, Japan and Singapore.