Aussies spend less buying online than others, but we're ahead on online banking use

Peter Dinham
Tuesday, 10 March 2009 08:25

IT Industry - Deals

While four in five Australians use online banking, with three-quarters paying bills online, we spend considerably less shopping online than other countries, according to a recent global digital study of the online behavior of consumers in16 countries including Australia.

Conducted by market information group TNS, the Digital World Life study revealed that, while we Aussies were found to be financially active online, those of us who actually shop online spent an average of only $760 in the past month compared to the global average of $3,160.
 
TNS’s director of technology research, Marcus Pritchard, says that the proportion of Australians shopping online is similar to what we are seeing globally with more than one in two having made a purchase in the past month, but there’s big variations in the amount of money spent.

According to Pritchard, there are “huge variations between different countries in terms of the dollar value that is being spent online.  Australia is one of the countries at the lower end of the scale and it appears other countries are making big ticket item purchases online, inflating their spend over the past month.”

The UK and the US, comparatively, are spending very little, with online shoppers spending only $290 and $230 in the past month.

Pritchard says that of Australians who bought or ordered something from the internet in the past month, the most common items acquired were electrical goods (25%), books (22%), clothes (18%), and tickets to theatre/ cinema (17%). Meanwhile, the British are mainly spending on books and music and most of Americans’ online spend is on books and clothes.

“These figures suggest that people are still not entirely comfortable buying high price-tagged items over the internet,” said Pritchard. “However, computer hardware and software is a different matter, with around 15% of those surveyed purchasing computerware in the past month.”

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