Europe Cross-Border B2C E-Commerce Market 2021

Europe Cross-Border B2C E-Commerce Market 2021

Amid the pandemic, online consumers prioritized more affordable prices and the variety of goods in cross-border shopping in Europe, says the new yStats.com publication.

A new publication from Germany-based research company yStats.com, titled “Europe Cross-Border B2C E-Commerce Market 2021” summarizes the key trends and projections of Cross-Border B2C E-Commerce market following the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. The publication discloses that in 2020 the majority of online consumers preferred international online shopping over domestic websites due to a greater variety of products and reasonable prices.

Germany and Czechia were the only countries in Europe that experienced no change in cross-border online shopper penetration

The share of B2C E-Commerce products imported from EU and non-EU sellers to the 27 European Union countries fell from 45% in 2019 to 40% in 2020. With that, the cross-border online shopper penetration rates decreased for almost all countries of EU28, except for Germany and Czechia, where there was no change compared to 2019. Meanwhile, the markets which suffered the most were Montenegro (-55 p.p.), Malta, Iceland, and Estonia (-18 p.p.), Bosnia and Herzegovina (-17 p.p.). With that, no market has seen an increase in share in 2020. Nevertheless, the future of cross-border B2C E-Commerce in the countries of Europe looks brighter in the near future: the share of cross-border online sales via global marketplaces was forecasted to increase from 60% in 2019 to 66% in 2025.

Cross-border B2C E-Commerce stays fragmented across the European countries.

Germany’s domestic online purchases prevailed international ones, namely, the share of online purchases from the countries outside and in Europe held 30-40%, while the in-country was approximately 70%. This was the case as well in Poland, Turkey and Russia. Unlike in these countries, in Italy, digital online sales from abroad outweighed (60%) the domestic (40%), whereas this was mainly because of the imports from European countries.