eCommerce Market in Austria – Top Players

“COVID-19 accelerated ongoing changes in the retail sector.”, says Austrian retail expert Hon.Prof.(FH) Dr. Anton Salesny from the Institute for Retailing & Data Science at Vienna University of Economics and Business. Comparably to similar industrialized economies, Dr. Salesny describes a pronounced corona effect in Austria, citing ecommerceDB figures: “While parts of brick-and-mortar retail had to cope with lockdown-related sales and frequency losses, and others faced capacity bottlenecks due to increased demand, sales in online retail grew significantly. For example, total net sales of the top 250 online stores in Austria increased by around 35 percent year-on-year and amounted to around €5 billion in 2020.” Which are the stores involved? These are the top 10 by net sales in Austria in corona year 2020:

amazon.de is the unbeaten leader in the Austrian market of first-party online stores. With total net sales of €1.1 billion generated in Austria in 2020, the German URL of tech giant Amazon is unreachable for second-placed zalando.at. According to Dr. Salesny, amazon.de’s incomparable success in Austria has to do with pricing. Compared to Germany, product prices are generally higher in Austria. As amazon.de offers rather “German” prices, it has an advantage over competitors. Third-placed mediamarkt.at is currently growing fast, according to Dr. Salesny, after the group merged its two famous electronics brands MediaMarkt and Saturn in the Austrian market and saturn.at now redirects to mediamarkt.at. The leading online stores have generally been growing fast recently, knows Dr. Salesny: “The data over the past few years shows significant growth of the top players and, associated with this, a strong market concentration of these in the e-commerce market.”

The eCommerce market in Austria is indeed highly concentrated, as ecommerceDB data prove. With €2.3 billion, the top 5 online stores by net sales produced almost half of the total net sales generated by the biggest 250 online stores in Austria in 2020. Or as Dr. Salesny puts it: “The data clearly show: So far, it is especially a few large providers which are successful in online retail.” Due to the general trend towards multi-channel retail and different marketplace models, however, the boundaries between online and offline retail become increasingly blurred, according to the expert.