Gone are the days when we had to cart furniture, televisions or drinks all the way home from the shopping centre ourselves. Now all it takes is a click and the goods are delivered conveniently right to our front doors. E-commerce is the name of the game that has been making our everyday lives easier for more than two decades now. The breakthrough of commercial internet shopping reaches back to the mid-1990s. Amazon appeared on the scene in 1994, followed a year later by eBay – and the rest is history: the two e-commerce giants have changed shopping for ever. While Amazon is now the online shop with the most sales, eBay is one of the most traffic-heavy websites.
Now, before Christmas, is when trade on the platforms particularly flourishes. Although online purchases on the notorious "Black Friday" fell slightly this year, they still added up to a hefty USDbn 8.9. The small decline of USDbn 9.0 on the figure for the previous year is not because people grabbed fewer online bargains, though: instead, many customers had brought their purchases forward due to the many discounting campaigns in October. Unlike in previous years, the challenges in the supply chain and the availability of products also limited what was offered. Sales on "Cyber Monday" can likewise be seen in this light. According to the Adobe Digital Economy Index, some USDbn 10.8 in total was spent in the USA on this day, a small decrease of 1.4% compared with 2020. Despite these declines, the data from Adobe suggest that current Christmas trading is still well on track to break online shopping records. Consumers spent around USDbn 110 in November alone, a jump of 11.9% on the previous year.
While e-commerce has been booming for years, bricks-and-mortar retail continues to suffer. The market share of internet sales in total global retail sales stood at just 7.4% in 2015, but in coronavirus-hit 2020 it reached 18% – and the curve is set to climb higher, eMarketer predicts. In the current year the share is expected to climb to 19.5%, with the threshold of one fifth being breached for the first time in 2022. Coronavirus has proved to be the catalyst for e-commerce, because the outbreak of the pandemic reinforced the already clear trend towards internet trading. Consumers have been resorting to classic online orders and even new business models such as click+collect in greater number – and the same is true across the world. The global growth rate, for instance, rose to a considerable 27.6% last year, a full seven percentage points more than in the previous year. Even if this rate were to decline again this year and next, the forecasts suggest that percentage growth will be at least in double digits going forward.
Over the last two decades the two internet giants, Amazon and eBay, have opened the market for many other players. In Switzerland, for instance, Migros offshoot Digitec Galaxus is the measure of all things. With two platforms and sales of around CHFbn 1.8, the online retailer occupies the number one spot in the country. Alongside Amazon and eBay, the top 10 also includes Zalando, another German e-commerce provider. And that's not the whole story: only founded in 2008, the firm is actually Europe's largest online fashion retailer. The Berlin-based company currently has more than 46 million active customers in 23 European markets. Thanks to coronavirus, Zalando recently added 11 million customers within the space of a single year.
Source: Statista, e = expected
Source: Statista
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