According to a GSI Commerce survey in 2011, 45% of people in UK prefer to shop online while 64% of the people at least check the fashion retailer’s website before they make their buy. A survey from 2011 might not be very up-to-date, but based on later surveys the numbers are still similar. And what’s more, the fact that 45% of the people PREFER to shop online, doesn’t mean that they actually do that very often.
But, according to a research from Voxburner, 28% of young people (think 16-24), buy majority of their clothes online from shops like Mainline Menswear, Sports Direct, or pretty much any other online clothes supermarket. According to the same study, 44% of the people still buy their clothes mostly on the high street.
When we look at the number of people who bought clothes online in 2014 at least once, the percentage, depending on the exact age of the people, is anywhere from 42 – 63%. That is, except for the consumers in ages 65+ in case of whom the percentage of people buying online was just 19%.
While online shopping is gaining momentum, still the two main problems consumers see with it, remain. Firstly the fact that it’s often not so easy to get the right size and secondly that we can’t confirm the quality before we buy anything. The first problem will most likely be solved very soon with the evolving online size calculators. The second one, we’ll see. But until both of these problems have been solved, you just need to find the retailer you can trust. For example, in case of Mainline Menswear, you can simply contact them and they will help you with any sizing questions, as every sizing query is individually measured for you by their advisers. Additionally they can also answer all your questions about the fabrics, the quality, and anything else you might be concerned about.
When we look at the online shopping numbers and then compare the numbers we brought out before with the numbers of HuffPost Style poll in the United States, they don’t seem to be so much different. In US roughly 56% of consumers shop online at least once or several times a year while 34% never shop online. Obviously, all of these statistics we need to take with a grain of salt, as whatever anyone says about the quality of polling, all of the polls mentioned here had around 1000 respondents, and often from one segment (i.e. Huffpost Style readers).
