Press release

31 June, 2004 - Internet has Spawned a Nation of Full-time Shopaholics

...When UK consumers aren’ t in stores they’ re online - SciVisum study reveals ..

UK consumers could be suffering from severe ‘shopaholicism’ as they jump online to make purchases as soon as high street stores shut their doors for business or during office hours when they are chained to their desks - new research has found.

Online buying habits have been revealed to complement high street retail store opening hours and office hours. Shopping activity online is the busiest during the working day and late evenings, when consumers are restricted from purchasing in high street stores - either due to stores being closed or physically being unable to shop on the high street. Conversely, online shopping was found to be particularly slow at weekends, during high street rush hours with activity peaking between 7:00pm and 9:00pm on Sundays.

Surprisingly, the week day peak lasts from 12:00pm to 5:30pm, showing that online shopping is not just restricted to the lunchtime period and employees are taking full advantage of broadband Internet connections in the workplace. However, UK shoppers do not seem that interested in the 24/7 benefits touted by Internet retailers, with the average ‘online shopping day’ occurring between 10:00am and 11:00pm.

These were the key findings of the Ecommerce Buying Trends Study 2004, by web testing specialist SciVisum, which examined the online buying habits of UK consumers on the top retail web sites over a period of one month during May 2004. The study aimed to identify, daily and weekly trends in online shopping and industry wide peak shopping times for e-consumers.

“The Internet has spawned a nation of full-time shopaholics” said Deri Jones, CEO of SciVisum. “If consumers can’t get to the shops, they are feeding their addiction online, injecting a new passion into the UK’s love affair with shopping. The SciVisum study has revealed that this passion for shopping is eating into the business day - employers need to be aware that it’s not just restricted to lunch breaks and may be impacting on employee productivity. This is great news for retailers but shows that high street stores that do not have an online presence may be losing out from this shopping frenzy”.

"With 20 million UK shoppers expected to spend £17 billion on line this year on top of high street spending it comes as no surprise that UK consumers are shopaholics. The SciVisum study reveals some interesting online buying habits. The first lesson for retailers is that they must have in place a robust online presence to capitalise on this demand and secondly they need to ensure the performance of their web sites to cope with peak online shopping hours. These may surprisingly not display the patterns that they had predicted," commented James Roper, CEO, IMRG (Interactive Media In Retail group).

Industry wide peak times were identified after monitoring the 'add to basket function' on the websites of more than 50 leading UK retailers at 10 minute intervals over a 4 week period. Calculating the average change in response times of the ‘add to basket’ function across all of the sites identified daily and weekly trends in online shopping.

Shopping basket functionality, a critical step in the online purchasing process is noticeably slower during peak online shopping times when web sites are processing higher volumes of user requests. This also indicates that websites are struggling to handle peak traffic consistently.

The 51 leading UK ecommerce web sites tested included retailers of music, books and videos (18 per cent), clothing and fashion (23 per cent), catalogue department stores (22 per cent), consumables and electrical equipment (14 per cent). The remaining 23 per cent of web sites tested consisted of web sites selling DIY products, mobile phones, cameras and gifts.

About SciVisum
SciVisum is a UK based web site testing specialist offering engineered monitoring and testing services to help organisations measure and improve the performance, functionality and resulting user experience of business critical Web based systems. The company’s in-house research and development, and a unique test methodology enable cost effective in-depth testing and monitoring of complex web based applications. This includes sophisticated web systems and functionality such as online order processing, shopping carts, banking applications, auction systems, intranets, extranets and online billing.

SciVisum services include: 24/7 Monitoring, Load/Stress Testing, Functional Audits, to identify opportunities for optimisation and Accessibility Testing, to meet the requirements of the Disability Discrimination Act.

Media contacts:
Alia Ilyas/Sarra Mander
Rainier PR
Telephone: +44 (0) 20 7494 6570
Email: ailyas@rainierpr.co.uk
smander@rainierpr.co.uk

Media contacts

Emma Ballard/Sarra Mander
Rainier PR
Telephone: +44 (0) 20 7494 6570
Email: eballard@rainierpr.co.uk/smander@rainierpr.co.uk