In a bid to solve the UK financial crisis, our Prime Minister has seen fit to make iPods a few pounds cheaper.
Woolworths and MFI are just a couple of businesses that have already gone from our high streets and more will follow in 2009 which is a sad reality of our current economic down-turn.
One shining light in all of this though is the web. John Lewis’s high street sales this Christmas past were pretty depressing but their website broke sales records. JL weren’t alone. We spent a fortune during the run up to Christmas. On 8th December we were spending a million quid a minute. UK online sales were expected to top £13.2 billion.
That’s startling considering in 2000 we spent just a few hundred million. 8 years before that it was zilch.
Those billions go to independent shops, couriers, folks like me, ad agencies, price comparison sites, payment processors, suppliers. However, we can’t underestimate the role that broadband has played in this. Ecommerce existed before broadband but it wasn’t until connection speeds reached a decent level that things started to change.
New online services will be subject to restrictions when they have to be used on the UK infrastructure of old cans and string. It’s costing the UK £12.5billion a year to cut VAT. According to Broadband Stakeholders Group £28.8billion would bring the latest fibre optic connections to every UK home. Slightly slower fibre would cost £25billion. Going a bit lower (a connection speed of 30 - 100Mbps) would cost £5.1billion - the total cost; not an annual amount.
If we were able to reach that then future online industries could make the ecommerce revenue look like pocket change.
Posted by Steven Grant on 04/22 at 10:11 AM
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