I recently published a report on The European eCommerce Landscape; it shows that more than two-thirds of European online consumers are shopping online, but there are big differences among the different countries. The top categories bought online are travel, clothing and accessories, leisure and entertainment, and consumer electronics. Forrester’s European Technographics® data also reveals that European consumers increasingly prefer the Internet to high-street shops for purchases of music, computer software, event tickets, and videos: 

In recent years, the Internet has become the leading channel for media products. In 2012, more European online consumers bought videos/DVDs, music, event tickets, and computer software online than offline. These online media purchases fall into two categories:

1.      Digital (sold direct as a download).

2.      Physical (a product that an Internet retailer delivers).

The digitalization of media has been an enormous success. Although online sales of games, videos, and music (whether digital or physical) in the UK fell 3% from £1.989 billion in 2012, if we isolate the digital sales of these three entertainment products, we see an increase in revenue from £927 million to £1.033 billion in 2012. Similarly, digital books will continue to see growth: Forrester forecasts that Europe will be the largest eBook market in the world by 2017, with revenues of $19 billion.

The next step for European eCommerce will be mobile. Forrester's Technographics data shows that more than half of European online buyers have already used a tablet or mobile phone in the past three months to support a purchase in some way. Forrester's mobile commerce forecast for 2012 to 2017 for the EU-7 predicts that mobile eCommerce revenues across Europe will rise from €1.7 billion in 2011 to €19.2 billion in 2017, reaching 6.9% of total web sales.