Coverage

Mintel’s Online Retailing – Europe, July 2019 focuses on the five major economies in Europe, though we do also include estimates for 14 smaller, but important economies in the Executive Summary – The Market section. In total these countries account for around 95% of all European retail sales, excluding Russia. Online retailing is developing fast, even in the most developed online markets. But the level of development varies considerably and, in general, southern Europe lags well behind Northern Europe.

The report provides market size data and forecasts for 21 European countries from 2014 to 2024, and includes profiles of 18 major online/multichannel retailers.

The five major economies are looked at in detail: the UK, Germany, France, Italy and Spain are each covered in separate country sections, which are also available for purchase as individual reports. These countries include extensive consumer research commissioned exclusively for our report(s).

Consumer research

For our consumer research this year we asked questions on the following topics:

  • Which products consumers have bought online in the last 12 months

  • The retailers used for online shopping in the last 12 months

  • Shopping behaviours online

  • Membership of Amazon Prime.

The UK report includes these questions and looks at the issues in greater depth.

Market definition

This is a report about shopping online. At risk of over-simplification it is about (almost) everything you can buy in shops. It does not include services or downloads. Nor does it include any B2B activities. In the UK those are covered in a recent Mintel report on B2B E-Commerce – UK, March 2019.

Our market sizes and forecasts are for all retail sales transacted online. But we make the distinction between sales by store-based retailers and those by retailers who only trade online (or do the majority of their business online) and we refer to those as “pureplayers”. For the former, we think that online is an integral part of the store-based retail proposition and that it is artificial to make a distinction. For the pureplayer, online is the only route to market and every visit to a website has to be paid for through marketing.

Marketplaces

One of the features of the development of e-commerce has been the growth of “marketplaces”. Marketplaces are umbrella organisations that allow small retailers to trade more effectively. The largest and most obvious example operating in Europe is eBay. But it is not alone and AliExpress, the consumer side of Alibaba, is growing fast in Europe as well.

But many other online retailers offer similar services. Amazon is the obvious example and over half of Amazon’s total retail volume is now through its marketplace sellers.

The perennial problem in a report such as this is whether to include marketplaces, such as eBay and AliExpress. We have decided that it is right to do so. In part this is because it would be inconsistent to include Amazon and not the leading marketplaces. But we also think that there’s an analogy with voluntary or symbol groups. Marketplaces provide an umbrella organisation for independent retailers to trade under, in the same way that, say, Spar does for independent grocers. eBay is doing much to give the impression of a unified retail offer.

There are other grey areas in these definitions. For example, should something that is ordered online but collected in-store (Click & Collect) be included? And what about Argos’ “reserve and collect” service – if something is ordered online, but collected and paid for in-store? Our solution is to follow the companies in how they define it and in how they make their returns.

Our national market sizes are for online retail spending by consumers in each country so they include any purchases from non-domestic retailers (ie cross-border). An exception to this is the UK report, where we use ONS data as the basis of our market size. ONS data is based on returns submitted by retailers in the UK, so will exclude online sales where these are fulfilled by a company based outside of the UK but is likely to include sales by UK companies to any overseas customers.

Market sizes

Market sizes are quoted including VAT.

The online market sizes (excluding the UK and Germany, where we use bevh figures in Online Retailing – Europe, July 2019 are proprietary Mintel market estimates. The basis for these estimates is set out in the Executive Summary – The Market section.

Methodology

We follow the methodology developed in 2015 to calculate the size of the e-commerce market in individual European countries in order to more accurately reflect the size of the market.

For most markets in Europe there is very little data about the e-commerce market. But some things are clear. One can tell, for example, from those figures published by retailers and from Eurostat data where a market is quite underdeveloped. We have therefore used data from well researched markets (such as Germany, Spain and the UK) to help us estimate the size of the less developed markets.

Financial definitions

The definitions used in this report for company performance are:

  • Sales: Turnover as reported by the company, excluding VAT

  • Operating profits: The profit made on trading after all associated costs and depreciation, but before any exceptional charges and financing costs

  • Pre-tax profits: Operating profit less finance costs and any exceptional charges, but before tax and dividends

  • Operating margin: Operating profits as a percentage of sales.

Crown copyright material is reproduced with the permission of the Controller of HMSO and the Queen’s Printer for Scotland.

VAT rates

VAT rates were raised in many countries during the downturn, but there have been no further changes since France edged up its rate from 19.5% to 20% on 1 January 2014.

Figure 1: VAT rates around Europe, 2014-19
01-Jan-14 01-Jan-15 01-Jan-16 01-Jan-17 01-Jan-18 01-Jan-19
% % % % % %
Austria 20 20 20 20 20 20
Belgium 21 21 21 21 21 21
Czechia 21 21 21 21 21 21
Denmark 25 25 25 25 25 25
Finland 24 24 24 24 24 24
France 20 20 20 20 20 20
: : : : : : :
: : : : : : :

Abbreviations

B2B Business-to-Business
B2C Business-to-Consumer
bevh Bundesverband E-Commerce und Versandhandel
C2C Consumer-to-Consumer (sales)
CAGR Compound Annual Growth Rate
CNMC Comision Nacional de los Mercados y la Competencia
COICOP Classification of Individual Consumption According to Purpose
CPI Consumer Prices Index
: :
: :
Back to top