Serbia is Europe's eCommerce growth champion

After a post-pandemic slump, Europe’s eCommerce market is back on the growth tracks. Despite the drop in revenues of -7% year-on-year in 2022, for the period between 2022 and 2026, the eCommerce market volume in Europe is expected to register an annual growth of 12%. This means that the market will pass the US$1-trillion threshold by 2025. Europe’s eCommerce market is primarily driven by traditionally strong economies like the UK (2022 eCommerce market volume of US$164 billion), Germany (US$116 billion) or France (US$83 billion). However, with around 80% of consumers in these countries actively shopping online, eCommerce penetration is already very high and other countries still have a lot of penetration potential to be tapped. In other words, the growth champions in terms of relative eCommerce growth in Europe can be found elsewhere:

While the biggest European eCommerce markets by total market volume can be found in the West and North of the continent, Eastern Europe has the growth champions. In relative growth terms, all markets in the top 10 are in the East and South-East of Europe, with Serbia leading the ranking. Between 2022 and 2026, Serbia expects a compound annual eCommerce growth of 24%, which is twice as much as the European average. Serbia will reach an eCommerce market volume of US$1.4 billion by 2026. Serbia is closely followed by Turkey, with a CAGR of 23% between 2022 and 2026. With an annual growth of 21%, Hungary is at rank 3. Azerbaijan, the 10th fastest-growing European eCommerce market in relative terms, is still 7 percentage points above the European CAGR average. Still, the growth champions are far away from competing with the currently leading European eCommerce nations in total market volume terms. With US$1.7 billion, Azerbaijan produced less than 2% of Germany’s eCommerce revenue in 2022, for example, which was US$103 billion.

Do you want to find out more about eCommerce in Europe? Are you interested in further market figures and country rankings? Or would you rather like to know which country has the largest share of online shoppers older than 55, what kind of products Italians usually send back or whether the typical French online shopper has a high, medium or low income? Find all of this and more in the brand-new ecommerceDB trend report “eCommerce in Europe”!

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March 2023