A recent MasterCard survey has found that nearly half of Hong Kong's respondents shop online, with two thirds of them saying that they expect to make online purchases during the next six months.

The survey interviewed 8,500 individuals across 15 markets in the Asia Pacific/Middle East/Africa region during the period between September 3 and October 1, 2010.

According to the survey released Thursday, 49 percent of respondents from Hong Kong reported having shopped online. The younger shoppers are the trend-setters, with 73 percent of respondents from the city aged between 18 and 24 indicating that they have made purchases online.

"The Internet has taken on an indispensable role in the everyday life of many Hong Kong consumers as access becomes ever more pervasive and convenient," the survey report noted. According to Nielsen Net Ratings, there were around 4.9 million Internet users - out of a population of around 7.1 million in Hong Kong as of June 2010, representing 68.8 percent of the city's population.

For those who have bought online in the past three months, the average number of items purchased was 4.3, up from 3.9 items six months ago, the survey shows. "Movie/concert tickets" were the most popular items purchased by Hong Kong's web shoppers, with 35 percent of respondents indicating that entertainment tickets were their favorite things to buy while shopping online. "Hotel accommodations" came in second at 32 percent, followed by "air tickets" at 31 percent.

Online shopping has been gaining popularity as high-speed Internet access becomes more readily available and time-pressed wage earners take advantage of shopping from home.

Online retailers and online shopping platforms are prospering as the large number of Internet users become ever more savvy. Taobao.com, China's largest online shopping platform, said earlier that its registered users had reached 370 million in 2010, while the average number of transactions per user expanded by 35 percent compared with 2009. Transaction volume on the Taobao Mall, the domestic web shopping center, quadrupled in 2010 from a year earlier. Taobao said that it sold an average of 48,000 items every minute in 2010.

Amazon, a global online retailer, is also showing strong growth. Its third quarter sales surged 39 percent to $7.56 billion compared with the same period last year.

Also helping the online shopping boom is the fact that people are increasingly comfortable buying items on the web. According to the survey, 69 percent of Hong Kong's respondents said that they were satisfied with online shopping, compared with 63 percent in 2009.

As online shopping has grown over the years, mobile shopping is also catching on, another trend the survey has helped to shed light on. Of all respondents across the 15 markets, 19 percent reckoned that they had made purchases via their mobile phones, up from 8 percent in 2009, while 15 percent of Hong Kong's respondents reported doing the same thing.

China Daily

(HK Edition 01/14/2011 page2)