Two percent of visitors to retail sites – 700,000 people – made online purchases in 1999, and numbers of visitors to e-commerce sites have doubled in the past six months alone.
The trends are attributed to the increase in new sites and improved promotion. Average promotion budgets for French retail sites have doubled from less than FRF200,000 (EUR30,500) to FRF400,000 (EUR61,000) in the past year.
Travel sites are most popular with online customers in France, followed by information technology sites and sites selling cultural products.
Benchmark Group predicts that Internet sales will triple again in the coming year.