Australia are slowly embracing online shopping, but the US are absolutely nuts for it!
I find this stuff fascinating and maybe it’s because I work across both markets and see if first hand, but these two charts from Google Insights paint an interesting picture.
Firstly, there’s no doubt that ‘shopping’ as a category is growing in Australia and the chart below clearly shows this. However what’s caught my eye is the stark differences between the size of the ‘interest spikes’ around the last quarter of each fiscal year.
In Australia the baseline in interest has been growing year on year at a healthy rate, and we are getting relatively strong spikes in Q4.
Yet in the the US, check out the pre-Christmas spikes in interest – huge!
You can’t see it in these charts, but the forecast for this year is for more of the same.
They’re in fact so large, that the baseline year on year interest is pretty flat.
Fascinating…
…and If you are planing to shop online this year, don’t forget to search for coupons on RetailMeNot.com. I never pay full price, so neither should you!
all good things
that is incredible the variation between the US & AU as far as those interest graphs. Obviously we see the lag for AU behind US in most ecommerce trends but usually not with such a different pattern. Good post & i’d be interested to see more search trends that you notice. cheers
Thanks Brandon, I’ll try and be a little more insightful with the next one too! …but you are right, it is quite fascinating to look at global trends at a micro level.
Leigh
Huge difference in online spending patterns. Incredible really. Especially the overall increase of 37% for AU and only 8% for US. Australia is definitely losing their inhibition about spending online. Probbly because there are better (more secure) websites these days, Australians need the element of trust to expose themselves (their c/c details) online.