Brits happy to pay delivery fees for online shopping

Monday, August 6, 2012 - 15:06 by Sarah Collinson

Research carried out by OnePoll, has found that most people in the UK are not fussed about the added expense of having to pay for delivery when purchasing products through safe shopping online.

This is despite the fact that the annual cost of doing so is about £3.5 billion for the whole of the country, which is not an insignificant amount.

Part of the reason that delivery costs are being seen as an acceptable feature of the e-commerce experience, is that there are plenty of other expenses that are being avoided when people choose to make online purchases.

At the moment, the average cost of getting an item delivered is £2.99, but when you factor in the price of petrol, parking and refreshments associated with a typical trip to the high street, this is definitely a relatively small amount of money.

Eighty eight point nine per cent of respondents said that they will either be spending more money via safe shopping online, or sustaining their current level of purchasing, over the next five years.

This shows that there is still plenty of room for the market to grow in the UK, perhaps to the further detriment of high street retailers' performance.

Thirty six per cent of those questioned said that they primarily used e-commerce sites because of the convenient nature of the shopping process they afford. A fifth of respondents said that they were fans of online shopping because the high street is simply too crowded and stressful.

Twenty per cent of people questioned in the survey asserted that all of their shopping would be done online, if they had the option. But of course, in the modern age, it really is possible to buy anything you want online, since the variety vastly outpaces the high street.