You are here: silicon.com > Retail & Leisure > News

Online shoppers still paying with cash and cheques

Web retailers need to offer payment options

Tags: online shopping

By Steve Ranger

Published: 4 January 2007 15:00 GMT

More than half of European web users regularly shop online - though not all of them are making their payments over the internet.

Nineteen per cent of Italians use cash on delivery.

Of the web shoppers buying products and services online in the past three months, 24 per cent used offline payment methods, 64 per cent used only online payment methods, and the remainder used a mix, according to a survey by Forrester Research.

silicon.com Retail & Leisure

Get the latest retail and leisure news straight to your inbox. Sign up for the R&L newsletter today!

For example, while 60 per cent of UK web shoppers prefer to pay with a credit card, only 26 per cent of Germans choose this option. In contrast, 17 per cent of French like to pay for online shopping with cheques, while 19 per cent of Italians use cash on delivery.

These strong national preferences make it difficult for European online retailers to offer a single online payment method, according to analysts at Forrester.

But new payment mechanisms such as PayPal are catching on. The UK leads the way with 35 per cent of online shoppers mentioning PayPal as one of their preferred online payment methods.

Retailers looking to improve their online sales should reassure their visitors about online security from the homepage. Forrester warned that too many online retailers wait for online shoppers to reach the checkout stage to display their security measures when it would be far more helpful for shoppers to have the information on the homepage.

Retailers should also continue to offer offline payment methods and offer new online payment systems as well, the analysts suggested.

  1. Zones
  2. Management
  3. Networks
  4. Software
  5. IT Services
  6. Hardware
  1. Verticals
  2. Public Sector
  3. Financial Services
  4. Retail & Leisure


  • Jobs
Development Team Lead, Slough, E-Commerce, LAMP, Agile, Scrum

My client are one of the UK & Europe's fastest growing online retailers in the UK with product distributed into close to 100 countries worldwide, and ...

ISU Billing Tester- Long Cycle

Large Energy Corporation looking for a ISU Billing Tester to work in Crawley.Required Skills for Assignment* 5 years experience in IS-U billing, in ...

Systems Engineer Global Payments

This will be joining the GP Operations team responsible for 24x7 monitoring and outage response of all Payment systems. This team is involved in new ...

Petra Papinniemi
Legal Eye: Ecommerce held back by outdated laws
No wonder no one's buying...

Matthew Cushen
E-tailers: Be choosy overseas
Markets are not always what they seem

Tim Ferguson
'If you look at iPlayer from a distance, it's still very web 1.0'
Q&A: Erik Huggers, director, BBC's Future, Media and Technology

Kit Burden
Legal Eye: Tech could brighten retailers' gloom
Regulation and recession loom

Matthew Cushen
Retailers: Look to emerging markets
Comment: Massive opportunities if you get the IT right

Julian Goldsmith
How Zavvi lost its Virginity
IT director Tony Johnson on the retailer's changing web strategy

Agenda Setters 2009
Welcome to the ninth annual Agenda Setters poll – silicon.com's list of the top 50 most influential individuals in the technology and IT industries, from techies and CIOs to entrepreneurs and business leaders. Find out more in our latest special report.


IT services
Outsourcing, offshoring and much more...



Quick Sitemap Links: