Analytics, Banks, Estonia, Financial Services, Internet, Retail

Every third young person is a regular buyer from online shops and more than half of them prefer shopping online once every couple of weeks, SEB said.

"The growing activeness of young people in online channels arises on the one hand from the developments in e-commerce, and on the other, from the better income of young people in recent years. Both the share of young people getting a higher than average wage and the number of people being paid an average wage has increased in recent years,"  SEB Board Member Ainar Leppanen said.

The patterns of online shopping reveal that at the moment, young people are still concentrated on the most popular online shops, such as Alibaba, Amazon, AliExpress, but purchases from certain apps and chat applications like Facebook Messenger and Instagram, are gaining ground, although currently, only 10 percent of young people are using them according to SEB's assessment.

In line with the overall trend, the average amount of a purchase also decreased last year among the young, but the drop was only a few euros -- from 19.43 euros in 2017 to 17.23 euros in 2019. The average purchase amount among young people clearly remains under the 33 euros an average customer spends on a purchase.

The younger population also clearly prefers foreign shopping channels that make up more than 85 percent of all their purchases. In total, young people paid 17.8 mln euros to foreign sellers and local merchants were left with 2.7 mln euros.

SEB's online shopping analysis is based on a customer survey conducted by the bank on e-commerce, and an analysis of e-commerce card transactions during the period 2017-2019.