euroblaze | OXID e-Commerce User Blog

The local shopping startup Milo has recently been acquired by eBay – for 75 million dollars. Milo connects the worlds of online and offline stores by searching local store shelves in real-time to find the best prices and availability. The business concept of Milo is to show you what’s in-stock where, and tell you how much it costs at that very moment. Milo also allows insight into detailed product information and user reviews. In short, Milo makes it easy to access both online and offline shopping in one place.

For eBay, Milo represents just another way to get into the $917 billion market of online research to offline buying. And Forrester estimates that this will eventually reach $1.3 trillion and account for nearly 50% of total retail sales by 2013.

eBay plans to bring the inventories of its sellers to Milo. The company will also integrate Milo’s local product feeds into both its online marketplace and mobile applications. eBay’s barcode-scanning iPhone application RedLaser will also feature Milo local results.

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).