• Could there be more compet­i­tion though,to help things get even cheaper? Is there anything more we can do crack down on scams? Are UK online busi­nesses good enough at respond­ing to change?
• The OFT says if we trust who we buy from, we can get the best deals — we gain the confid­ence to shop around (making busi­nesses more compet­it­ive), and we’re more likely to try new things (giving busi­nesses a reason to make new products and improve old ones).
• They think we need to find ways for online busi­nesses to be more consist­ent, that we all need to work together to protect ourselves, increase trust in buying online and remem­ber that we’re not just deal­ing with the UK, online shop­ping is global.
• They say we’re in a good posi­tion: number 1 in Europe for busi­nesses selling online, and Ireland second. Second only to Luxembourg for the number of people work­ing in these busi­nesses, third to Norway and Denmark for number of people buying online, and most trust­ing of inter­net business.

But funnily enough, not every­one trusts the inter­net. Nearly 20% of people with an net connec­tion don’t shop online, and a third of those aren’t shop­ping because they’re scared of getting scammed.

Even when people shop online regu­larly they’re more worried about being ripped off then, than when they shop on the high street.

The OFT thinks this all adds up to people perhaps spend­ing less online than they could, small busi­nessesfind­ing it too diffi­cult to get online – elbowed out by estab­lished brands – and it might mean people demand tougher rules when they’re not really needed. Are they right?

They also say that despite this worry, know­ledge and under­stand­ing of how to stay safe online has actu­ally gone down. Less people look for the little padlock symbol, and only a quarter knew what cook­ies were, though another 28% claimed they knew some­thing about them.

But people are adapt­ing well to the new ways of pricing things they keep coming up with, like when they give you a price upfront then tack on extras afterwards.

Big big savings

Not to mention that the inter­net could save us all a lot of money, espe­cially people who don’t earn very much in the first place. But people who don’t earn very much­don’t have as much access to the inter­net either, and even when they do they don’t pay for as much online.

So they want to help with:

Is this enough? What else should they do? From what they say in the consulta­tion, aware­ness campaigns seem like a tempor­ary solu­tion — everything moves so fast that what’s right now will be out of date in a year — and then what?

The OFT thinks that our tradi­tional model of deal­ing with fraud­sters, scam­mers and complaints isn’t enough. We’re not deal­ing with dodgy locals anymore, and even when we are they might be doing busi­ness some­where else.

The combined efforts of the Police, Trading stand­ards and the OFT are supposed to be improv­ing things, but we’re not really there yet.

The OFT think these things will help:

It’s only about 15 years since the inter­net became really popu­lar, and in that time things have moved incred­ibly fast. Technology and busi­ness models are chan­ging all the time, so fast that our laws can’t always keep up. The OFT thinks we need some soph­ist­ic­ated ways of work­ing out what’s going to happen next. They want to:

• Make sure that when things change, the rules are right behind them (or even ahead).
• Put systems in place to work out where things are going, what the trends are, so they can under­stand and deal with new ideas better and faster.

That’s about it. You can have a closer look at the consulta­tion if you want to know more detail, send your ideas straight in, or get talk­ing on twit­ter, face­book or even this blog — everything helps. Make sure you’ve got everything down by 13 October 2010 though!