Online shopping more popular among Britons
18 Oct 2011
The use of credit cards to pay for goods in the UK may be increasing as the number of online retail searches increased in the third quarter of 2011.
According to the Online Retail Monitor from Google and the British Retail Consortium (BRC), searches of this nature were up 35 per cent as from the number in the same period last year.
Imported products too seemed to be popular as searches for overseas vendors registered a 78-per cent year-on-year rise in the second quarter.
According to director-general of the BRC Stephen Robertson the growth could be attributed to the increasing pressure on budgets leading people to look for bargains more carefully.
He said online retailing was still expanding faster as compared with store sales with searching from mobile devices showing the most dramatic increase.
Online banking had become popular recently, with a study by building society Nationwide finding 77 per cent of the population used the service, as against only 58 per cent using social media sites such as Facebook.