Everything You Must Know About Hong Kong Luxury Online Shoppers

Ecommerce adoption in Hong Kong is growing.

According to recent surveys, 88% of Hong Kong residents have shopped online in the last 12 months. Millennials (aged 25-29) have higher chances to do so (96% of the total) but also 50+ years old people shop more online than ever before. Additionally, users are shifting more and more from desktop computers to mobile devices when shopping online.

This applies to e-commerce in general, but how about online shopping of luxury goods? How does the typical high-end shopper look like? What does he/she shop the most?

We at Goxip tried to answer all of these questions, wrapping up some fresh data on our customers and their buying habits.

Luxury brands users are mainly Millennials – 43% of the total are 25-34 years old. The 25-44 years old bracket represents 70% of the total shopping audience.

This is pretty much aligned with the average online shopper profile, because it’s a factor of different variables.

- One is purchasing power. We can’t expect teenagers, people with no disposable income, to shop luxury goods. Indeed only 13% of them browsed Goxip in the last few months.

- Second variable is internet penetration. Even though Hong Kong has one of the highest number of people connected in the world ( 85% of the population), we can’t expect 45+ users to be as tech savvy and connected as millennials. In fact they are not and this is reflected in their shopping behaviour, that might lean more towards traditional retail shops. A side note: Hong Kong is only second to London as regards traditional retail presence for the luxury market so It’s pretty convenient to shop offline anytime and anywhere.

Interestingly, when drilling down to gender level, we found out that:

- Women represents almost 70% of the total luxury goods online audience

- Men users are clearly older than women. 35+ men make up 60% of the total, 5% points higher women in the same age range. So what we said about older users being less interested in online shopping applies more to women than men.

So the main takeaway is: women greatly outnumber men as regards luxury. Millennials are the key for both gender, yet men seems to be older than women on average.

Luxury online shoppers are much more mobile friendly than average. The difference is just staggering. Take a look at the pie charts below, where we compare our own data with average Hong Kong internet users. The two just mirror each other.

In fact, more than 80% of luxury shoppers browse on mobile devices while only 44% of other online shoppers do so.

This is really surprising for two reasons:

1. Hong Kong greatly lags behind on ‘mobile’ shopping in general especially when compared to other Asian countries in the region. To give you some perspective, South East Asia mobile share of traffic is above 70% for all countries with Indonesia peaking at 87% and Thailand at roughly 80%. Yet, this overall trend doesn’t apply to luxury

2.According to a recent global study, users who buy on desktop normally buy higher value orders as compared to users buying via tablet and mobile. This means the higher the price paid the higher the chances for users to buy on their laptops. Again, this doesn’t apply to Hong Kong luxury e-market

When going a bit further down, we can also see that 72% of luxury shoppers use Apple devices to browse online. This figure is 10% points higher than the average iOS usage in Hong Kong. Hence luxury shoppers also shop for high-end phones.

As you might expect, gender makes a difference in terms of buying preferences.

The lion share of sales goes into clothes for both genders – roughly 60% of the total value purchased. Yet, Women show a lot more variety in terms of products bought, second biggest category being beauty products (such as make up, skincare and perfume- 18% of the total). Also jewellery represents a good share of the luxury market- 5% of revenues coming from this category.

Men are clearly clothes only shoppers. Clothing, Shoes and Accessories are 94% of what they buy online. Interestingly, they are more into accessories than women, with a wobbling 15% of the total value they buy spent on items such as scarves, ties, gloves and socks. On the other hand, they do not purchase a significant amount of beauty/grooming products online yet, while women do.

Now you might wonder what are the top selling brands in the luxury landscape. Answer is not that obvious.

On the women side, the top brand is a surprisingly a skin care product, even though we saw that clothes is 60% of the total sales. Second and third brand fall indeed in the clothing/bag category hence aligned with the broader picture shared above. Men seem to like to shop Italian, with two out of three top brands coming from the country of pasta and pizza.

Hence to sum up

- Hong Kong luxury online shopping scene seems to differ significantly from the average, as concerns browsing and shopping behaviours

- Luxury brands users are mainly women and millennials. Men into luxury are older than women on average

- 80% of luxury shoppers browse on mobile devices while only 44% of other online shoppers do so

- 60% of purchased value is clothes for both genders

I hope this brief analysis was insightful and interesting to you. Do not hesitate to shoot me an email for any questions and suggestions at [email protected]