Older Consumers Flex Their Muscle (and Money) Online [The New York Times]

Any child knows that good things happen when grandparents reach for their wallets. Internet executives are starting to remember the feeling.

Older shoppers, who generally sat out the Internet’s first big commercial push, are helping to feed the surging Web economy. Many of them now have a few years of Internet surfing behind them — enough to give them enough confidence to click the “buy” button. And because this group has far more disposable cash than any other, executives who have not already begun tweaking their strategies to reach them will probably do so soon, online analysts and executives say.

“This group has been kind of overlooked until now,” said Heather Dougherty, an analyst with Nielsen/NetRatings, an online consultancy. “But the older boomers are far from newbies at this point. We’re not talking about people who are 100 years old and haven’t seen a computer.”

Ms. Dougherty said a recent Nielsen survey found that 27.4 million people age 55 and older bought something online in the last six months, compared with about 26 million a year ago. By contrast, the number of adults who bought something online in the last year actually dropped, to 107.4 million from 112 million.

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