UK e-commerce bigger, say analysts

British e-commerce: "Good for so many reasons"

By BBC News Online internet reporter Mark Ward

Reports that the UK has lots its place as the European e-commerce leader have been questioned by industry analysts.

The annual eCom index from computer consultants CMG tracks how much revenue companies expect to make buying and selling over the internet.

While 80% of the 250 companies questioned expected revenue from e-commerce to grow over the next year few are making money out of it at the moment.

The UK is good for
so many reasons

Matthew Nordan, Forrester Research

Less than 30% are making more than 1% of their total revenues from e-commerce.

The survey found that more French firms were doing well out of the web than UK companies. France regained the top spot as the e-commerce leader.

Survey questioned

But analysts asked whether the survey painted a true picture of the electronic state of the nations.

Matthew Nordan, an e-commerce expert from Forrester Research, said because English was the dominant language on the web it gave Britain and the US an advantage.

"The UK is good for so many reasons," said Mr Nordan. "Bar none it is the largest consumer market in Europe followed by Germany."

He added that the UK was the first expansion target for many US dot.coms which has attracted a huge influx of venture capital to fund start-ups.

In early May the Intelligence Unit of The Economist released a report about the most e-business ready countries which put the UK 6th and France 14th.

Statistics about the growth of the internet in the UK and France back up claims that Britain is ahead.

Up to date information about the number of .com domains registered in different countries put the UK third behind the US and Germany. France was way down the table at number 19.

The UK also has many more national domain names ending .uk registered than France has .fr according to figures compiled by the Internet Software Consortium.

Minitel matters

Francois Moscovici, an analyst from consultancy PriceWaterhouseCoopers, said he would be "very surprised" if the French were outdoing Britain on e-commerce. But he added that the French Minitel system might be skewing the results of the survey.

Minitel is an electronic phone book most French have that can be used to buy anything that can be found online and has been used for around 20 years. "French e-commerce is totally dominated by Minitel transactions," said Mr Moscovici.

When pure e-commerce activity was counted then the UK was definitely ahead he said.

This experience with Minitel had led many traditional retailers to move to the web quicker than their counterparts in the UK he added. The survey reported that French people can name more internet brands than British people can.

He warned against reading too much into the results of the survey because many of the companies were using e-commerce to take costs out of supply chains rather than sell to customers.

But the results could be down to apathy. A survey by FT.com released on 22 May found that 93% of British people don't want to work in the dot.com industry.