Online shopping: a tidal wave of opportunity

Jill found it difficult to wake up this morning. She is on her second sick day and too fatigued to leave the house. She ran out of vitamin D3 about 4 weeks ago. After a daily dose of 5,000 IUs of D – then 4 weeks without – she figured the lack of this hormone was keeping her sick. So, she endeavored to google “vitamin D3” and get a bottle delivered from the best online health shop.

Jill likely represents the typical Internet consumer. Globally, google is the most frequented website. In May 2009, google had over 4.0 billion search page views in the UK alone. With a market share between 64%-92% of the search engine pie, google is where the Internet-savvy go to research products and services before they buy.

The online health shop that comes up first in Jill’s search results for “vitamin D3” will probably get Jill’s business. She is then likely to produce her credit card and buy the vitamin bottle from the online store that is the easiest to navigate and has the most usable shopping cart (over 50% of online shoppers who placed items in their shopping carts did not go on to place an order).

Now that the global economy is in an enduring recession, online shopping is becoming the norm at the expense of traditional retail. To illustrate, let’s look at the United Kingdom consumer – 73% who are now online:

• since the recession, 33% of UK shoppers shop a lot more online
• 2008 UK online spending grew 25% to £18.4 billion, outperforming a paltry 2.1% increase in retail spending
• 97% of UK female Internet users research products online
• 92% of UK female Internet users buy products online

Granted, only 24% of the world’s population is online. That’s a mere 1.6 billion people worldwide. Estimates are that 700 million new people will go online in the next 5 years!

What will these hundreds of millions of new Internet users be doing? Well, most likely using that little search box in the top right of their Internet Explorer 8 web browser (defaulting to Microsoft’s search engine www.bing.com).

[ Research suggests that people are addicted to search: http://bit.ly/3Lj62K ]

Here is the current search engine battleground…

U.S. Search engine market shares:

1. Google – 64.6% (2% monthly growth)
2. Yahoo – 16% (-4.2% monthly decline)
3. Bing – 10.7% (22% monthly growth)

Australian market shares:

1. Google – 90%
2. Yahoo – 4%
3. Bing – 5%
4. Other – 1%

New Zealand market shares:

1. Google – 92%
2. Yahoo 3%
3. Bing 2%
4. Other 3%

Those businesses smart enough to [have] shift[ed] to the Internet marketing sphere are making fortunes online. Advertising expenditure trends are following suit. Nearly 50% of annual online advertising spending is on search engine ads. However, despite all that money being spent on paid ads (e.g. Google Adwords), paid (“sponsored”) search contributes to only 12% of the total search traffic. 71% of searchers trust organic search results (natural; achieved with search engine optimisation) over sponsored results.

[ More: "Online Shopping Through Consumers' Eyes: A Study of Online Users' Responses to 107 Questions" ]

And search is not the only hot online property where ecommerce businesses should have their presence. The next most popular arena is social media:

• in January 2009, 30 million UK Internet users - around 80% of the online population - watched web video
• behind google, youtube is the the second-most-visited destination for business searches with 1.5 million daily business-related youtube searches
• social networking websites are frequented by 75% of European Internet users
• facebook dominates 5% of all time people spend online

[ More: "Statistics Show Social Media is Bigger Than You Think" ]

1. So, is your business selling products or services online?
2. If so, do you have an easy to use shopping cart?
3. Does your website come up in the top 5 organic results on google, bing and yahoo search engines for your product(s) or service(s)?
4. Does your online business have a comprehensive social media presence?

To maximize your company’s online sales now and in the future, your answers to the above 4 questions should be a resounding YES.

See the writing on the wall? People are and will be researching products with search engines, favouring natural rather than paid search engine results, making purchasing decisions based upon recommendations from their network of friends on social media sites and ultimately doing the bulk of their shopping online.

Internet marketing opportunities abound! Embrace them.

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[all statistics taken from http://www.google.co.uk/intl/en/landing/internetstats/ unless otherwise noted]

[ More: "Online Shopping Means More Than Making a Sale" ]