Online shopping continues upward trajectory

According to a recent study by ecommerce marketplace Rakuten (owners of play.com), the British are the biggest online shoppers in the world, spending an average of £1088 each on the internet in 2012. That’s some distance ahead of the second placed Germans, who each spent £644.

That report didn’t include figures from China, but a second study, by Alibaba, suggests that while their individual online spend is ahead of Germany’s, at £703 it’s still some distance behind ours.

We’re also getting more accustomed to using social media to tell our friends and family what it is we’re buying online, whether that be a recommend or otherwise. Rakuten reckons social media were responsible for generating £1.8m of direct sales for them in 2012, a growth further boosted by a 122% increase in orders from social networks over a more recent six-month period.

It’s no real surprise that more of us are doing our shopping from the comfort of our own homes; quite apart from the general convenience and access to a wider choice, the weather we’ve had to endure over the last couple of years in the UK has hardly been conducive to wandering up and down the high street!

Matching that rise in online shoppers has been a corresponding increase in ecommerce traders, although the continuing uncertainty in the jobs market has also encouraged many to try their hand at starting their own business in the absence of permanent paid employment.

Many of these people are in turn coming to Davpack in search of their postal packaging products. As a result, we’ve now developed probably the biggest range of cardboard and postal boxes in the UK, designed to help these new entrepreneurs in one of the most vital parts of their business: getting their products to their customers as safely and cost effectively as possible.

That range includes cardboard boxes of all sizes and strengths, boxes designed specifically for books, clothes and shoes, flat boxes, long boxes, postal tubes, board envelopes and pop-up boxes, which are much quicker to assemble than the others!

We’re particularly proud of our range of postal boxes compliant with the new Royal Mail pricing structure; like many traders, we didn’t have much notice about the change, but were able to have the range designed, manufactured and ready to dispatch within a week of the new policy going live. We were also able to ensure our customers were fully informed of the changes from the very outset, reducing the chances of them getting inadvertently hit by the significant difference between the cost of sending small and medium parcels.

Of course, making sure we’re always ahead of the game has meant that we’ve been saving money for those buying their packaging with us for years. So if you’re thinking about setting up your own business, or if you’re already trading but are looking for ways to cut your costs, you could do a lot worse than check out our website or call our Customer team on 0844 800 9844.

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Rick Stanford

Rick has been a salesman in the packaging supplies business for more than thirty years. Now semi-retired, he divides his time between tending his allotment in north Devon, getting depressed at the continuing travails of his home-town football club Macclesfield Town, and sharing his considerable experience and knowledge with the readers of the Davpack blog. Davpack

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