• 20% of British consumers like to do their online shopping from work.
• 4% admit that being drunk was the reason for an online purchase made.
• 22% would spend less than 15 minutes shopping online.
• 43% of consumers spend between £20-50 a week online.
Figures from the Office of National Statistics (ONS) as per the report, Retail sales, Great Britain: January 2018, depicts a constant rise for online weekly sales from January 2015 to January 2018. With the process of shopping online incredibly convenient, considering you can have the items of your choice at the click of a button, it’s of no surprise online retail figures have increased significantly over the last three years.
As a result, British Online Marketplace OnBuy.com sought to find out what online shopping habits are most prominent among UK consumers. The data was collected via a survey, in which 1,550 people were asked about their online shopping routines. Going through individual responses for all regions, OnBuy could identify what the most common habits for buying online goods for each region of the UK are.
The respondents were asked two main questions, the first question was: ‘Where do you usually shop online from?’, for which the respondents could have more than one response, and the overall results for the UK were as following:
While Watching TV (54%), Bed (43%), Work (20%), Other (19%), Kitchen (17%), Train/Bus (12), Toilet (8%), On Holiday (6%), Garden (5%), While Driving (3%).
The second question was: ‘What is the reason behind your purchase?’, for which they were again able to select more than one response. These were the most cited reasons:
I needed the items (77%), Sale (38%), It was a gift (15%), Felt Depressed (6%), After a Breakup (5%), Other (5%), Was Drunk (4%), Too Much Money (3%), Lost/Gained Weight (3%).
Shockingly, the data shows shopping while driving is a habit for some Brits, with the North East displaying the highest percentage of drivers engaging in this habit. The toilet is also one of the most common places to browse the internet for 8% of the population of UK. Residents from the West Midlands enjoy this habit the most at 22%. Another surprising statistic collected had shown that 4% of Brits do their online shopping under the influence of alcohol, with the highest percentage (20%) found in the East Midlands.
How time-consuming is online shopping?
Furthermore, OnBuy sought to find out how much time and money Brits spend shopping online. When asked what the average length of time they spend online in one session, 22% of people said less than 15 minutes, while most people (47%) spend up to 30 minutes. 27% would spend between 30 minutes and 60 minutes, and only 7% of the people questioned would spend more than 60 minutes shopping online.
When you consider how much is spent online in a week, the survey revealed some astonishing figures. 32% spend less than £20 per week; significantly lower than anticipated. The majority (43%) of the respondents spend between £20 to £50, while 22% admitted to spending between £50-£100 on items in a single week. 5% of Brits who took the survey spend between £100 and £150 weekly, while 1% have admitted to spoiling themselves to the extent of spending more than £150 online.