France's annual e-commerce sales broke through the €100 billion barrier for the first time last year after another double-digit growth performance, according to data released by national e-commerce association Fevad.
Sales were up 11.6% on the previous year to €103.4 billion, its figures show, despite weaker demand in the fourth quarter. The figure includes sales of both services and products, with the latter accounting for 45% of the total.
Last year, more than 1.7 billion transactions were recorded by e-commerce sites, a rise of 15.7% on the previous year. This increase was accompanied by a decline in the average spend per French consumer which fell below €60, the lowest level ever recorded, Fevad said.
Meanwhile, the number of active retail websites in France continued to increase with 15% growth on the previous year, taking the overall number of e-commerce platforms to more than 190,000. The majority of these sites register fewer than 100 transactions per month.
In the space of 10 years, sales of products and services on the Internet have risen fourfold but Fevad underlined that they still only represent around 10% of total retail sales compared to 90% for physical stores. More than half of the products sold online are from retail store sites.
At a press conference at which the 2019 data were presented, Fevad appeared to play down the growth in online sales in France, underlining that in the UK the penetration rate is close to 20% and where turnover from e-commerce has reached €200 billion.
However, Cédric O, the French Secretary of State for Digital Affairs, who was present at the conference, sounded a more upbeat tone, describing e-commerce as ‘a French sector of excellence.’
He added: “You only have to look at the raising of capital since the beginning of the year, such as that for DIY site ManoMano, but will still need to go further.”
For the current year, Fevad is expecting a rate of growth similar to that in 2019, with e-commerce sites generating a turnover of €115 billion and close to two billion transactions.
According to the iCE 100 Panel index, the leading B2C websites increased their combined sales by 5.5% in 2019 on a like-for-like basis on the previous year.
Fevad said this was to be seen within a context of timid growth in household consumption despite government measures in favour of purchasing power (+0.8% in 2019, excluding spending on food and automotive, according to the Banque de France).
The association also highlighted a slowdown in the growth of the iCE 100 Panel index in the final quarter of last year. It increased more slowly (+3.2%) than last year and less quickly than the first nine months of 2019 “which demonstrates the absence of a movement of transferring store sales to the Internet, linked to social unrest in the fourth quarter.”
As for mobile phone commerce, according to the iCM index, sales from mobile devices (smartphones, tablets, mobile websites and apps) on online marketplaces rose by 18% in 2019 and accounted for 39% of the total turnover of the websites in iCM’s panel, an increase of four percentage points compared to 2018.
Mobile sales are expected to have a majority share in the next two years. Already, for the first time, visitors on mobile devices who consulted the Top 15 French sites, as listed by Fevad and market researcher Médiamétrie, outnumbered those visiting via computers.
Jamila Yahia-Messaoud, director of the Consumer Insights department at Mediametrie, commented: “While e-commerce is now firmly established in France today with more than 40.1 million e-shoppers, two emerging trends stand out which are going to shake up online purchasing habits – the growing use of mobiles and the choice of more (environmentally) responsible purchases.”
For his part, Fevad's managing director, Marc Lolivier, said: “Online shoppers are becoming more environmentally-responsible. They take care in selecting the sites they are looking to make purchases from and what they wish to buy. 53% of them declare that they take the environment into consideration when they make purchases online while 45% have already bought a product on the Internet from the circular economy.”
