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Books, most purchased item on Internet

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CIOL Bureau
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BANGALORE, INDIA: The market for online shopping has increased by 40 per cent in the last two years and over 85 per cent of the world’s online population used the Internet to make purchases, according to the latest Nielsen Global Online Survey on Internet shopping habits.

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More than half of Internet users have made at least one purchase online in the past month, says Nielsen. The highest percentage shopping online was found in South Korea (99 per cent), followed by the UK, Germany and Japan (all 97 per cent). The U.S. is at 94 per cent. In South Korea, 79 per cent of Internet users shopped in the past month, followed by the UK (76 per cent) and Switzerland (67 per cent) with the U.S. at 57 per cent.

Books, most popular

The most purchased items were books (41 per cent in the past three months), clothing/accessories/shoes (36 per cent), videos/DVDs /games (24 per cent), airline tickets (24 per cent) and electronic equipment (23 per cent). Developing countries like China, Brazil, Vietnam and Egypt were the biggest online buyers of books.

The number of books bought over the Internet increased by seven per cent in the past two years but clothing/accessories/shoes, which increased from 20 per cent to 36 per cent, witnessed the biggest growth. Online purchase of videos/DVDs and airline tickets/reservations rose two and three percentage points respectively in the past two years. More than 70 per cent of Indians and more than 60 per cent of Irish and UAE Internet users said they bought airline tickets/reservations on the Internet in the last three months, making travel the fourth most popular shopping category on the web.

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Credit card, the most preferred mode

Credit cards are the most common method of payment for online purchases with 60 per cent consumers using them for a recent online purchase. Of those paying with a credit card, more than half (53 per cent) used Visa. Turkish online shoppers topped the global rankings for credit card usage (91 per cent), followed Irish (86 percent) and Indian and UAE (84 percent) online shoppers.

One in four online consumers chose PayPal while debit cards are most popular with UK (59 per cent) and U.S. (40 per cent) online shoppers. Nielsen said online shoppers tend to stick to the shopping sites they are familiar with, with 60 per cent saying they buy mostly from the same site. One-third used a search engine while one in four relied on personal recommendations.

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