The European B2C e-commerce market posted another successful year with double-digit revenue growth in 2014 even though the growth rate slowed down a bit, with another double-digit increase expected for this year as well, according to a new report from the Ecommerce Europe association.
Last year, overall B2C e-commerce sales in Europe increased by 14.3% to € 423.8 billion. When counting only the 28 member states of the European Union, these countries experienced similar growth, with the EU28 B2C e-commerce turnover reaching €368.7 billion, the European B2C E-commerce Report 2015 revealed.
Wijnand Jongen, Chairman of Ecommerce Europe’s Executive Committee, stated: “It is great to see that B2C European e-commerce is performing so well. On a global scale, the European market ranked second last year, only behind Asia-Pacific, which is mainly driven by the unleashed Chinese e-commerce market. Europe is expected to experience another double-digit growth next year. According to our forecast, European B2C e-commerce sales will increase by 12.5% and amount to €477bn in 2015. With this, Europe will increase its lead on third-ranked North America.”
In terms of individual countries, the UK remains the largest B2C e-commerce market in Europe, with revenues increasing 14.7% to €127.1 billion in 2014. With this growth, the UK increased its lead on its biggest competitors Germany (up 12.3% to €71.2 billion) and France (up 11.2% to € 56.8 billion), ranking second and third respectively.
At a regional level, Western Europe (including both the UK and France) turned out to be by far the largest region in terms of e-commerce sales with its B2C e-commerce revenues reaching €208.1bn last year. This represents nearly half of the entire European B2C turnover.
Central Europe, which includes Germany, was the second-largest B2C e-commerce region, with a turnover of €106.5 billion and a market share of a little over 25%.
In general, the biggest growth in terms of B2C e-commerce sales can be found in Central and Eastern Europe, with Russia leading the way. In 2014, this Eastern European giant generated growth of 25.4%, resulting in a B2C e-commerce turnover of €18.8 billion. This adds to the fact that Russia is already the fourth-ranked e-commerce market within Europe, and this growth rate further strengthens its position, according to the association
While e-commerce in Europe is booming, the overall economy shows a fairly low growth rate reflected in the European GDP which only increased by 1.6% to €17.3 trillion. Within the EU28, this growth rate was even a little lower at 1.4%.
At the same time, the share of e-commerce within European GDP continues to grow, nearly doubling from 1.27% in 2009 to 2.45% in 2014. It is expected to grow even more strongly in the next few years, with the European e-GDP expected to reach an estimated 6% in 2020.
Other indicators of the growing importance of e-commerce in the European economy are the considerably growing number of B2C websites and parcel volumes in 2014. Whereas there were around 650,000 B2C websites and 3.7 billion parcels shipped in Europe in 2013, the figures are estimated to have increased to about 715,000 B2C websites and 4 billion parcels in 2014, according to the report.
