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TV Shopping Is Proving More Popular Than Online, Says BMRB

Shopping via interactive television is growing much more quickly than similar transactional services offered by the internet, according to a new survey from research company BMRB International.
The Digital Viewer Survey found that in just two months since the launch of Open’s interactive services on Sky Digital (see Open’s Sales Top £1m A Week), 7% of users have already made a purchase through their televisions. By comparison, PC-based e-commerce only attracted this proportion of users after they had been using the internet for longer than six months and after the services had themselves been around for a number of years. The figures are drawn from BMRB’s Internet Monitor survey.
“Online TV shopping growth could well outstrip the rise in PC e-commerce this year,” predicts the survey’s author Paul Milsom. “Familiarity with the TV is helping online shopping via this platform to grow at a greater pace than the internet.”
The report also showed that a third of Sky Digital’s viewers, over 1.8 million people, expect to be buying online via their television sets within the next twelve months. This would represent a four-fold increase in the number of TV-based shoppers, even before cable and terrestrial digital interactive platforms have become widely available.
BMRB says that security fears, which have so far held back the development of internet-based transactions, are not affecting TV shopping systems to the same degree. Forty per cent of digital viewers believe that entering their credit card details into a TV shopping service is safe; for internet viewers with less than twelve months’ experience of the medium, this confidence drops to 30%.
BMRB: 020 8280 8282