The latest publication from Hamburg-based desk research company yStats.com titled “Europe Cross-Border B2C E-Commerce Market 2021” shares insights into the Cross-Border B2C E-Commerce market state in Europe amid the COVID-19 health crisis in 2020, summarizing the key figures, forecasts and trends. The publication discloses that in 2020, domestic B2C E-Commerce outweighed cross-border purchases in most countries.
Germany and Czechia were the only countries in Europe that experienced no change in cross-border online shopper penetration
The share of B2C E-Commerce products imported from EU and non-EU sellers to the 27 European Union countries fell from 45% in 2019 to 40% in 2020. With that, the cross-border online shopper penetration rates decreased for almost all countries of EU28, except for Germany and Czechia, where there was no change compared to 2019. Meanwhile, the markets which suffered the most were Montenegro (-55 p.p.), Malta, Iceland, and Estonia (-18 p.p.), Bosnia and Herzegovina (-17 p.p.). With that, no market has seen an increase in share in 2020. Nevertheless, the future of cross-border B2C E-Commerce in the countries of Europe looks brighter in the near future: the share of cross-border online sales via global marketplaces was forecasted to increase from 60% in 2019 to 66% in 2025.
Cross-border B2C E-Commerce stays fragmented across the European countries.
Germany’s domestic online purchases prevailed international ones, namely, the share of online purchases from the countries outside and in Europe held 30-40%, while the in-country was approximately 70%. This was the case as well in Poland, Turkey and Russia. Unlike in these countries, in Italy, digital online sales from abroad outweighed (60%) the domestic (40%), whereas this was mainly because of the imports from European countries.
In the UK, the share of online consumers shopping abroad made up half of the overall online consumers in 2020 and Russia experienced a decrease in cross-border B2C online sales
Despite the expected increase in 2020 in the number of cross-border online consumers from 22 million in 2019 to 23 million in 2020, due to Brexit, the figures were predicted to decline to 21 million in 2022. In Russia, in spite of a significant increase of the total B2C E-Commerce sales between 2019 and 2020, i.e. from EUR 25 billion to EUR 35 billion, the share of cross-border B2C online sales fell by 8 p.p.
