Online shopping increases across Europe

Wednesday, July 4, 2018 - 10:22 by Graham Miller

The entire European continent saw an uptick in safe shopping online last year, with 2017’s sales generating around £470 billion in total.

This is according to the European B2C Ecommerce Report 2018, which revealed an 11 per cent increase in online spending in total. 

Furthermore the figures suggest that the market is actually gaining momentum at the moment, with this year’s growth set to hit 13 per cent.

If this holds true then the size of Europe’s e-commerce market will have doubled in the course of the past half-decade.

The UK has always been a leader when it comes to safe shopping online, with domestic sales growth outstripping European averages for some time. However, as the market matures and the threat of stagnation looms, it looks like other countries will step in to take up the slack.

With £157 billion spent online by British consumers last year, it easily eclipses second place France and third place Germany, both of which generated close to £82 billion apiece in web-based sales. 

Amazon was identified as being the biggest single winner from the rise of online shopping, with 33 per cent of all British e-commerce sales conducted via its site.

There is still a lot less of an appetite for online shopping in Eastern Europe, where 94 per cent of sales are retained by bricks and mortar outlets. This has more to do with the lack of availability of infrastructure to support e-commerce, rather than a cultural aversion to it existing amongst consumers.

Internet access is available to 83 per cent of Europeans, while 38 per cent of people made purchases from a retailer that was based in another country, signalling the important role that cross-border e-commerce is set to play in the course of the coming years.