E-Christmas 2001 up 40% on 2000. (Trends).(Brief Article)

Last Christmas saw 33m Europeans visit retail sites during December as, following expectation, it became the largest Christmas online so far.

According to the latest study by Jupiter MMXI, this represented a 40% increase in the number of unique visitors to Web sites from the previous December.

Germany and the UK were the heaviest users of online retail sites, with 10m and 9m unique users respectively. Also, amazon.de, amazon.co.uk and amazon.fr reached more than 10% of the populations in Germany, the UK and France.

"While it's not surprising that Germany and the UK have the most online shoppers, since they have the most people online, it's interesting that the number of shoppers isn't proportionate to the number of users. It's far more than you'd expect," said Dan Stevenson, analyst at Jupiter. "The Internet market is more mature in these countries, so a lot more people feel comfortable buying things online."

Electronic greetings cards sites also experienced a pre-Christmas boom. As well as the established US site bluemountain.com, egreetings.com in the UK, epost.de in Germany and carteexpress.com in France also increased their audience.