euroblaze | OXID e-Commerce User Blog

According to a report from Germany-based payment processor Deutsche Card Services, part of the Deutsche Bank Group, women account for 58.9% of purchases, but men spend more and are more likely to pay with a credit card than women.

“Overall, online purchasing and payment has become more of an everyday occurrence for customers, who use the Internet more and more for buying household goods,” says Jens Mahlke, a member of the management board of Deutsche Card Services in introducing the company’s “E-Retail Report 2010.” The report is based on an analysis of 7.5 million online purchases processed by Deutsche Card Services between October 2008 and September 2009.

The forecast of Forrester Research predicts an annual growth of e-commerce in the EU of about 10% until 2015. Sales in the 17 EU states will presumably increase from 91.9 billion euros in 2011 to 133.6 billion euros in 2015. Also pretty interesting and worth mentioning is a north-south gap in the purchasing behavior of the Europeans, which was discovered in a previous study: While in the United Kingdom nearly 50% are regularly buying on the Internet, with little more than 10% the Italian and Spanish fellows barely use the internet to purchase (Source: Forrester Research).

The e-commerce portal “Internet Retailer” has recently published a study about the 300 largest online stores in Europe. Not surprisingly, Amazon dominates the ranking. But there are also some unexpected results.

In 2010 the European e-commerce industry made around 118.3 billion euros. The top 10 web shops earned 23.2 percent of this amount, which is 27.4 billion euros. The top 300 companies earned together 57.5 billion euros. Amazon holds the lion’s share of this revenue with 9.36 billion euros – around a third of the revenues of the top 10 and 16.3 percent of the top 300. The Otto Group ranks on the second place with a revenue of 3.83 billion euros, the third place goes to Tesco stores with 3.15 billion euros. Another interesting result of the study: The top 10 web shops achieve a monthly average of about 471.6 million visits and have an average market basket value of €188.60.

(Source: Internet Retailer’s Europe 300)

According to a new study of Sempora Consulting, Facebook has almost quadrupled it’s success between the year 2009 and 2010 in Germany. In comparison: Other European countries like France or the UK barely have doubled it’s Facebook users during this period. Same with the USA. Thailand is leading the chart with – believe it or not – 6x more Facebook users in 2010.

The following table compares the number of users between 2009 and 2010 among a variety of social networks in Germany.

(Source: Internet World Business 4/11)

Here some more interesting facts about Facebook from a global perspective:

• More than 500 million active users
• 50% of active users log on to Facebook in any given day
• Average user has 130 friends
• People spend over 700 billion minutes per month on Facebook
• There are more than 200 million active users currently accessing Facebook through their mobile devices.
• People that use Facebook on their mobile devices are twice as active on Facebook than non-mobile users.
• There are more than 200 mobile operators in 60 countries working to deploy and promote Facebook mobile products

A very interesting and illustrative infographic about the success of Facebook can be found here.

In January 2011, the fashion house ESPRIT has spent the biggest amount of money in online campaigns.
The following table compares the spendings between January 2010 and January 2011 among several leading companies in Germany:

(Source: Internet World Business 4/11)