The home shopping market has increased by 4.6% in 2000 to reach an estimated £10.62 billion - are consumers changing the way they shop?

What factors will influence the future of the home shopping market?

Are retailers adopting a multi-channel strategy to encourage consumer demand for products?

The market for shopping from home is becoming increasingly diverse. Long gone are the clear demarcations between mail order companies and high street retailers. Increasingly, the same companies operate through shops, catalogues, online and, in some cases, through digital TV.

Retailing is increasingly becoming a multi-channel world. This is not simply in response to changes in technology that facilitate new channels, but because consumers are changing the way they shop and demand greater flexibility from the retailers they shop with. The emphasis is very much on convenience and this includes convenience of access to products and services across many product categories.

This report takes as its main focus the extent to which consumer needs vary within and between product categories and quantifies, for the first time in a Mintel report, how behaviour is influenced by the existence of multi-channel access to products. Consumer research specially commissioned for this report shows the degree to which consumers make use of more than one channel when making a purchase. The report addresses such issues as how many consumers select goods from a catalogue but order online, or how many see goods in a catalogue but buy from a shop.

In this respect, the main focus of the report is quantifying whether the following proposition applies equally to all product categories:

"Home shopping service providers need to pursue a multi-channel strategy in order to provide access to their brand by whatever means is most convenient for their customers to use."

The main service providers are reviewed in terms of operations and financial performance and assessed for the extent of their multi-channel presence.

The report also presents findings of trade research into the current state of the sector and what the current and future issues are that are likely to influence its future structure. The shift from agency mail order to multi-channel retailing is the main focus of attention.