£58.8bn revenue, F-Commerce and mobile shopping
No I didn't make £580bn revenue - that would be nice 
I read a few interesting articles today in a pull-out feature on e-commerce in todays guardian newspaper in the UK.
It had some interesting facts that I thought might serve to motivate, provoke thought and inspire people (it did me).
- In 2010 £58.8billion was spent online in the UK alone, this is predicted to be ~£69billion this year (if this is how much is spent in the UK, how much do Americans spend online?)
- It's expected that for 'traditional' businesses, their sales will be split 50/50 with offline and online
- Since the year 2000, more than £300billion has been spent online in just the UK
I'm probably not the only one who reads that and thinks 'if I can just get a slice of that.."
If that wasn't interesting enough there is also a feature on what they are calling....F-Commerce. Otherwise known as Facebook Commerce. It basically talks about a company called Oriflame that is at the forefront of turning facebook into a shopping mall. They talk about "putting customers at the heart of their business" which I think meant really 'making it easier to sell ****' :p
They are bigging it up to be like some sort of second-coming.
I found this extremely interesting though because as business seems to be investing more in facebook as a shopping platform (because of it's highly targeted audience), customers themselves are reported to be leaving facebook, and supposedly lost 100,000 users from the UK in May alone:
Facebook Figures Slump In Key Markets Britain And America According To May 2011 Numbers | Technology | Sky News
If all that doesn't wet your appetite, there is another interesting article about 'making the most of mobile' which had some interesting stats in there too...
- Shopping via mobiles grew by 5.8% in 9 months with browsing up by 14.3%
- Approx. 88% of people searching by mobile for local information take action within a day
The article wasn't as excited as it was about Fbook but, it did end by saying if your business does not have a mobile app then you will be left in the dust.
So, that only leaves the question:
What are you doing to keep up with the tide?