Editor’s note: This article was first published in May 2015; the country-by-country search data come from a Fixr.com map of that period, and the Spanish e-commerce figures it cites are from 2013–2014.
We have split this article into two sections. In the first, thanks to the price-estimate website Fixr.com, we look at which prices people search for most in each country, based on the most frequent Google searches. In other words, the products that came up most often in response to the question “How much does xxxx cost in … (the country in question)”.
In the second, we look at the products that people actually buy most on the internet, to get an idea of what sells most easily online, or which products and services inspire the most confidence when it comes to buying them over the internet.
In the first case, the interest in finding out the price of certain “products” is, to say the least, rather curious from one country to another.
As the map produced by Fixr.com shows, in Spain, what interests Spaniards most is the price of food. This confirms our theory that the most profitable businesses are still food, clothing and technology (though they are also the most saturated, and not without room for innovation and opportunities).
In Brazil, Colombia, Latvia and Bulgaria, the most searched-for prices are those of prostitutes, while in India people want to know the price of a cow.
One of the most curious cases is Iran, where the most searched-for item is the price of a kidney. In Japan it is electronic products, while in Mauritania people are interested in the price of a slave.
Australia leans towards searching for the price of in vitro fertilisation, Germany for beer and South Korea for rhinoplasty. And, as you might expect, in the United States the most searched-for price is that of patents. That’s what an entrepreneurial character and a business mindset will do.
All this is really more of a curiosity, though. Now let’s look at the most profitable products or services on the internet: the ones that sell best, or that users are most willing to buy and pay for online.
(Read: These are the products with the highest profit margins)
To find out which products sell best online, we turn to data provided by Hemerotek.com, which gathered figures on online business in Spain and put online sales at around 15,000 million in 2014, and rising.
Four out of every ten euros spent on e-commerce in Spain go to the tourism sector. So the ranking of online sales looks like this:
1. Travel agencies and tour operators
It is estimated that travel packages worth a total of 633 million euros have been bought online in Spain. Remember that, construction aside, tourism is the sector that moves the most money and generates the most direct and indirect employment in Spain.
2. Airline tickets
At 390 million euros, selling airline tickets online is big business, although it is already dominated by a handful of giants and price-comparison sites.
See also: How to increase a business’s sales: 3 steps and strategies
3. Direct marketing
This business has moved 165 million euros, as Spanish companies become increasingly aware of how important it is to be present online and to use internet marketing to boost their sales.
4. Bus and taxi
Services such as BlaBlaCar, Uber and Cabify compete for a pie worth around 50 million a month.
5. Clothing
Online clothing sales are starting to take off in Spain, where companies such as Inditex, Mango and Adolfo Domínguez, as well as apps, have already staked out their positions. The curious fact, though, is that of sales of around 100 million per quarter in 2013, 60% were bought by Spaniards from foreign websites.
Clearly, sales of online advertising and internet marketing services will keep growing, and gambling and sports betting will keep booming too.
Electronics tend to be more readily accepted as something to buy online, as do books, music downloads and digital newspapers and magazines.
So we hope these figures give you a rough idea of where things are heading in e-commerce.
Further reading
- How to find the perfect product to sell online
- Probably the 9 profitable businesses we will see in the short term
- 9 home-based business ideas that don’t need commercial premises
Featured image: Marek Slusarczyk, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
