UK online retail ‘to sustain double-digit growth over the next 5 years’

Online retail in the UK will grow at a ten percent compound annual growth rate over the next five years according to a new report.

The study, from Forrester, looks at the future of eCommerce in Europe.

 Forrester projects that online retail across 17 of the largest EU markets in Western Europe will hit €114 billion by 2014 and that 190 million Europeans will shop online by 2014 (up from 141 million today).

Online retail in Western Europe will grow at about 11 percent a year, slightly ahead of the UK and the US, two mature markets. 

Forrester’s forecast shows a distinct divide between the more mature markets of Northern European countries, and the still emerging online retail markets in Southern European nations. 

The Forrester forecast is based in part on a survey of nearly 26,000 European consumers and is being released in conjunction with a similar forecast for online retail in the US, where growth rates over the next five years will hit 10 percent annually. 

“Much of the overall retail sector’s growth in both the US and the EU over the next five years will come from the Internet,” said Forrester Research Vice President and Principal Analyst Sucharita Mulpuru. “To maximize that growth, eBusiness professionals will have to help enable a multichannel strategy that responds to consumers’ increased desire to hop between the offline and online worlds and their increasing mobile and social behaviors. The retail innovators over the next five years will demonstrate customer enablement across all touchpoints, not just via a PC-based Web browser.”