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To: blankmind who wrote (105)	11/3/1999 1:26:00 AM
From: blankmind	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 306

Swedes, Germans Are More Likely To Shop Online, Forrester Says By JEANETTE BORZO THE WALL STREET JOURNAL INTERACTIVE EDITION November 2, 1999 AMSTERDAM -- Internet users in Sweden and Germany do the most online shopping on a per capita basis among five European countries, based on an unpublished survey from Forrester Research Inc. In July, Forrester surveyed Internet users in France, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden and the United Kingdom and found that about a third of the Europeans who have access to the Internet in one form or another are shopping online, according to Emily Nagle Green, manager of Forrester's European Research Center in Amsterdam, who discussed the study Tuesday at Forrester's European Marketing & New Media Forum. About 48% of the Swedish population has Internet access, and roughly 40% of those Net users are also shoppers, Ms. Green said. While a greater percentage of Dutch people have Internet access than do residents of Germany -- 21% of people in the Netherlands have Net access compared with 19% in Germany -- nearly half of Germany's Internet users are also shopping online. Increasing personal-computer ownership in Europe has helped spur the online-shopping boom. Some 52 million Europeans will have access to the Internet through their PCs by 2003, Ms. Green said, noting that the figure will double from last year's 26 million. But many Europeans may end up accessing the Internet from mobile phones, Ms. Green said, pointing to figures that highlight the market potential: 33% of those in the countries studied currently use mobile phones. Digital television -- which gives consumers an option to interact with television programming, advertisements and the Internet -- is also seen as a Net-access device with a strong European future. "Digital-TV use is not even measurable in the U.S.," Ms. Green said. Among the five European countries studied, however, the U.K. leads with 6.3% of homes watching digital television, followed by France (2.9%), Sweden (2.4%), Germany (2%) and the Netherlands (1.1%). While Europeans in all five surveyed countries did a lot of shopping for books, compact disks and computer goods, Swedes are more likely to buy movie tickets online than German or French Net users, while U.K. residents are more likely to book air travel than any of their counterparts in other countries. While not shopping, residents of the U.K and Sweden spend a lot of time researching vacation options while 55% of Dutch users go online to research a purchase before making it. "The Dutch have a preference for cautious shopping," while "Scandinavians in general are the most avid consumers of publications offline -- and they are transferring that to the online world," Ms. Green said. Germans and Swedes are both fond of online banking, she said, in part because German and Swedish banks moved online quickly. "In France and the U.K., there is much less [online banking] available," she said. Convenience and round-the-clock shop hours -- rather than price -- are the biggest factors spurring Europeans to buy online, Ms. Green said, while those who don't shop online avoid it primarily because they don't want to put their personal and/or financial data online, or because they don't want to buy merchandise that they can't pick up and examine. Forrester expects it to be a merry holiday for online merchants in Europe. "This is the year things are really going to happen -- Forrester is very optimistic about Christmas this year," Ms. Green said. Forrester will publish the research in a series of reports over the coming months.