KEY POINTS:
Online shopping works well for those who do it, but one-third of New Zealander internet users still refuse to take the bait, according to new research.
Nielsen NetRatings' latest monthly Online Retail Monitor has found that over the last four months, 61 per cent of internet users had made purchases online.
Of those who said they bought something online during March, 93 per cent reported being "satisfied or very satisfied" with the experience.
Although more than two-thirds of potential internet shoppers researched potential purchases online, 33 per cent of the country's internet users do not go through to make actual purchases online.
Those shunning online purchasing cited fear of credit card fraud as the major reason, followed by concerns about identity theft and the worry that they would receive spam emails after passing on their contact details.
The findings show e-tailers still have a big PR job to overcome the widely-held - and almost entirely unfounded - fears of a large proportion of their potential customers.
"The research clearly shows that most New Zealanders feel very secure about making a purchase online, and this security helps to add satisfaction to the whole user experience," said Tony Boyte, senior analyst for Nielsen NetRatings,
"Easing the security concerns for the remaining few could lead to universal online shopping for all those with access to the web."
Some businesses find the online selling job easier than others.
Air New Zealand said this week its online sales had topped $1 billion for the year.
The airline had budgeted for $1 billion of sales in the year to June but had passed the mark nearly a month early.
Yellow without pages
Yellow Pages Group this week launched the "beta" version of its much-hyped new website: www.yellow.co.nz The site offers a much better searching experience and includes innovations such as interactive mapping and itinerary planning, plus the ability to do "comparison shopping".
The beta tag still attached to the site is geek-speak for "we're pretty happy with how it's working but can't guarantee we've ironed out all the bugs yet".
A launch of the certified bug-free version is promised this month.
As this column reported last week, e-marketers who previewed the site last month were generally impressed with what it had to offer.
Yellow Pages Group is now promoting the site as offering "every New Zealand business a free web page" - really an enticement for small companies to update and enlarge the group's major asset, in the competitive advantage sense, its business listing database.
YPG marketing director Blair Glubb said the company's research showed that about 65 per cent of New Zealand businesses do not have their own website.
Xero downside
The NZX's latest darling, accounting software newcomer Xero, had another positive run on the market yesterday, mirroring some positive US sentiment shown earlier in the day for two much larger listed tech stocks: Google and Salesforce.
Xero's price hike probably had nothing to do with Google and Salesforce's good day on the US markets.
But the concept of "software as a service" at the heart of Xero's business is the same notion getting US investors excited following a partnership between Google and Salesforce.
Salesforce, which specialises in customer relationship management software, is one of the global success stories based on the software-as-a-service model, the concept of selling software on a monthly or annual subscription basis.
It is a system being emulated by Rod Drury's Xero, in part because it offers a pricing structure which appeals to cashflow-sensitive small businesses.
The Google/Salesforce partnership, which will give Salesforce customers direct access to online advertising through Google, helped send Google's share price to an all-time high.
