When I talk to people about the Internet – the first reaction is always : “Yes! Today you have no choice”.

Then when I dig a little deeper – you hear the real stories.

The “Yes… but…”

– not in our industry

– people are not buying online really

– the market is not ready

– it is still early

So first, who is connected?

Look, in case you haven’t noticed but everyone is.

You want numbers? Here they are:

Age 20 to 64 : 95%

Which is virtually everyone.

And the tendency is not going to go reverse any time soon:

The young generation is connected younger, and connected people in their late 50s and 60s today will not be less connected when they will be in their 70’s and and 80’s

And, what do you think they do when they are connected?

What would 95% of the population do?

Well… pretty normal things :

  • they search for informations about stuff they need – be it a product or a service. Actually over 89% (and probably more) are using a search engine before making a purchase decision.
  • Some buy things online – more and more actually – in 2007 it was around 25% average in Europe and today it’s more than 50%. If you look in details, you’ll see that places like the UK are already at 80% of its population buying online. Even France which is late on every trend is now at 55% of people buying online. The one who are dragging the stats down are countries of eastern Europe (Bulgaria was 2% in 2007 and is just 12% now or Romania who was also 2% and is just 8% now) – but they are improving and they’ll catch up.
  • When they don’t buy online, they check prices while they are in your shop, using their phone. (Google is reporting it’s around 82% of shoppers – which is an enormous proportion – but even if it’s just 50% that’d be already impressive).
  • They make money – with a growing amount of ecommerce businesses or even just people buy and selling on platforms like ebay / Airbnb / etc.
  • They save time – buy using google map, waze, and every other apps they can to get the information they need in no time (which include travelling information, buy plane tickets, etc.)
  • They have fun – watch-time of video and audio online is skyrocketing – TV is dead already for a while – (the only reason TV is not buried yet is because we are waiting for when advertisers will realise no one is watching and they’ll move their dollar somewhere else).

In short, Internet is a part of every aspect of our society, and for now it seems it’s not going anywhere. So you’d think more seriously about how you plan to build your internet presence and take care of what you do online because it is only going to get more and more critical.

Just my 2 cents…