European Web retailers to enjoy banner online Xmas
Thursday November 13, 7:53 am ET
By Bernhard Warner, European Internet Correspondent
LONDON, Nov 13 (Reuters) - European Web shoppers will ring up 9 billion euros in e-commerce purchases for the 2003 Christmas period, closing the gap on the United States, the home of "e-shopaholics", a new forecast said.
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With this year's must-have gifts decidedly on the techy side -- from DVD players to digital cameras and video game consoles -- more of Europe's shoppers than ever are expected to flock to the Internet to browse and buy.
"Europe is hot on the heels of the U.S. this Christmas season," said Forrester Research analyst Hellen Omwando, who estimated that there are 166 million online shoppers in Europe.
She added shoppers in Western Europe are expected to purchase 9 billion euros ($10.52 billion) worth of goods between November 1 and Christmas day, up 18 percent from last year's Forrester Christmas forecast.
The U.S., the world's largest online retail market, will generate $12 billion in 2003 e-commerce Christmas sales.
Analysts have predicted that Europe could surpass the U.S. as the world's largest online retail market by the end of the decade as credit card penetration and trust in the medium grow.
RISING FROM THE DOT-COM ASHES
The projection is a rare bit of good news for a sector that had been decimated by the bursting of the dot-com bubble. Countless Internet firms sprung to life in the late 1990s, selling everything from dog food to jewellery, only to run out of money after their first Christmas.
The big online players today are recognisable high street retailers such as UK grocery chain Tesco (London:TSCO.L - News), Fnac.com, the online arm of Pinault Printemps Redoute (Paris:PRTP.PA - News), plus dot-com survivors Amazon.com (NasdaqNM:AMZN - News) and eBay (NasdaqNM:EBAY - News).
The Forrester forecast counted sales projections for 17 Western European countries -- the 15 EU member states plus Finland and Switzerland.
According to Forrester, the UK and Germany will account for 63 percent of European holiday sales. The largest product categories will be travel bookings, books and groceries, Omwella said.
"It's pointing to a very big year, simply because people started shopping as early as October," said Dorothea Arndt, marketing director for the British arm of Kelkoo.com, the Web-based price comparison shopping service.
She said the top gift search requests are for electronic gadgets such as Apple Computer Inc's (NasdaqNM:AAPL - News) iPod digital music player, the Sony (Tokyo:6758.T - News) PlayStation 2 video game console and Nike (NYSE:NKE - News) trainers.
But the rise of online shopping also has a dark side. British shoppers, alone, are expected to lose 300,000 pounds ($504,800) every day to "card not present" fraud, in which fraudsters intercept credit card details during an online ortelephone purchase, the Association of Payment Clearing Services warned.
"This is where we expect fraud to migrate to," said Carl Clump, chief executive of online fraud prevention firm Retail Decisions (London:RTD.L - News).
