I collected some data on e-commerce in the UK. The United Kingdom had the third largest e-commerce market in the world in 2015. The most recent UK governmental figures placed the value of UK e-commerce sales at 533 billion British pounds in the same year. Estimates put the value of online retail sales in the United Kingdom at 60 billion euros in 2016. Meanwhile, B2B e-commerce sales via a website amounted to roughly 96.5 billion British pounds in 2015. E-commerce accounted for a 19% share of total business turnover in the United Kingdom in 2015. As of 2015, roughly 80% of UK Internet users did online shopping, the highest online shopping penetration rate in Europe.
And here we talk of the visible tip of the iceberg, as many physical purchases have started or been enhanced by digital.
So YES it is important, there is a big market place to address. Not going there is like missing a big potential market. If digital has been able to grow that quickly, it is because demand, the consumer i.e. yourself dear reader, found lots of value in there. And if consumers have radically changed their habits without looking back, on the offering side, companies and administrations have found the going difficult and it is still today a painful process paves with a lot of resistance.
Additionally, it is obvious that digitising the economy is a massive source of savings. It is not just the money. Digital brings quality by forcing a better description of processes, reducing data re-entry, enabling business and service continuity. Compare industrial products from the 1970’s with today’s, the quality is vastly better thanks to automation, and reduction of manual tasks.
This article was written on 19 Sep 2017, and is filled under Point of View.