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purchase goods online, the figures are nowhere near as compel- This large number of younger consumers in Saudi Arabia, who
ling as those for India (see graphs). will begin buying online for the first time, will be a driver of
total e-commerce sales growth in the next decade. However,
the average online revenue per consumer in Australia is much
higher; it is a much more mature market in which new entrants
will find that competition is already fierce and online consumer
expectations are clearly set.

While India has an estimated 177 million consumers who have
purchased something online, the value of online retail sales was
only $22 billion in 2017. This shows how a single metric, which at
first can seem compelling, must be used in conjunction with others
to build a true picture of the online sales opportunity. The value of
India’s wider internet economy is substantially larger than its online Mobile metrics
retail sales metric as many online transactions are travel-related Another set of metrics to consider is around the adoption of
rather than for the purchase of goods. Indicators point to India smartphones and mobile commerce, as they can indicate the
becoming an online sales superpower in the next decade, particu- likely growth in online sales. Consumers in developing countries
larly considering the growth of online marketplaces in the country, such as China and India often leapfrog desktop or laptop own-
but it has not happened yet. Similarly, there are big differences when ership and prefer mobile devices to access the internet. The UK
we look at the next tier of large countries, such as Japan, Mexico has a smartphone penetration rate of 82.2%, while China’s is 55.3%
and Russia. Just 37% of shoppers in Mexico have a bank account, and India’s is only 27.7%. However, when we look at the total num-
meaning it would be a struggle to sell significant volumes without ber of smartphone owners in each country, the picture is slightly
offering alternative payment methods. In Japan the figure is 98%. different. The UK has 55 million consumers with a smartphone,
Japan’s total e-commerce sales value is more than 10 times that of India has 375 million and China a massive 783 million.
Mexico, and more than four times that of Russia.
Overlaying these figures onto the number of people who already
purchase online, we can see that there is only a difference of 10 mil-
lion between the number of UK smartphone users and number of
UK consumers who shop online – as one would expect in a mature
e-commerce market.

In both China and India, there is a difference of circa 200 mil-
lion, showing huge growth potential. As both countries also have
relatively young populations and growing middle classes, we can
see that there are many more consumers with access to the internet
who could begin purchasing online before the respective markets
reach anything close to a state of maturity. We use such metrics and
a range of brand-specific indicators – including: brand awareness in
a market; the percentage of sales that are online in its category; and
The countries with the two smallest populations in our example direct competition – to score each country and create a ranking.
statistics – Australia with 25 million and Saudi Arabia with 34
million – provide an interesting comparison. The total number If you are unsure where to invest in selling internationally, or want
of online shoppers in each country is roughly the same, although to validate decisions already made, this exercise should provide
the total value of Australia’s online sales is three times that of valuable insight into achieving the best online sales growth. ••
Saudi Arabia. However, if we look at the median age of people
in each country then we can see that Saudi Arabia has a much Download Practicology’s free e-commerce research at www.practicology.com/
younger population (with a median age of 28.4 years compared insights/research
to Australia’s median age of 37.4 years).

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