Amazon triumphs in UK e-commerce survey

Monday, June 6, 2011 - 09:32 by Mike Price

A study of consumers who use safe shopping online in the UK has found that Amazon is the most trusted and regularly used of all the large sites, once more winning more plaudits than its closest rivals.

Almost 3,000 people were questioned as part of a survey conducted on behalf of Verdict Research and it was found that Amazon is responsible for about a fifth of all e-commerce visits carried out by web-savvy consumers.

Auction site eBay was a distant second, cornering just 7.6 per cent of the market, although it was just ahead of supermarket chain Tesco, which was responsible for 5.8 per cent of UK e-commerce, according to estimates.

Verdict spokesperson, Matt Piner, said that Amazon is leaps and bounds ahead of the competition when it comes to gaining customers who buy smaller products regularly, with a particular focus on videogames, books and music.

Interestingly, Play.com was the only other e-commerce firm to make it into the top ten, capturing 4.2 per cent of the market, just behind catalogue-based high street retailer, Argos.

This is the second survey in as many weeks which suggests that safe shopping online is becoming an avenue of real competition for the well known high street retailers. Many are leveraging their well established reputations to win over customers who might have previously visited their bricks and mortar outlets but are being wooed by the ease of e-commerce.

The survey has been published within days of the announcement that spending in May was down on the high street, while online shopping grew by over a quarter in the same period. E-commerce is not experiencing the same rate of growth as it was during the same period last year, but its ability to pick up the high street's slack is formidable.