European consumers to spend the same on holiday gifts as in 2014 - study

Online and mobile spending in 2015 will be about the same as it was in 2014, according to the Digital Index Online Shopping Prediction 2015 by Adobe software company. It analyzed 55 million online orders and data from 4,500 retail websites during the last seven years. Based on this information, every year Adobe predicts the online spending during Thanksgiving Day, Cyber Monday and other holidays in the United States, Europe and Asia.

In Germany, it’s expected 60% of all holiday purchases are done online, compared to 57% in the UK and 53% in France. For European consumers, low prices and great deals are the main reasons to shop online, while a variety of products is also increasingly playing a role. More than half of German respondents indicated that product diversity is the main reason for shopping online.

Adobe thinks the share of consumers who do their Christmas shopping on a mobile device will be about the same as it was in 2014. In Northern Europe, there are the most mobile consumers: Norwegian (25%), UK (23%) and Swedish (22%) consumers will probably spend more via mobile devices than consumers from the US (20%).

The study also shows that the period during which consumers shop their holiday presents is changing. In Germany, for example, consumers are shopping their gifts earlier than they were used to. Almost one in four respondents (22%) starts shopping before it’s even November. In the UK this percentage is 28%, but there are now more people who say they start shopping for gifts in the second half of November.