Statistics

The ecommerce industry in Spain achieved a total value of 2.8 billion Euros during the first quarter of this year. It’s remarkable that 43.2 per cent of transactions are cross-border online purchases and only 40 per cent of the total volume relates to purchases from Spanish local sites.

The ecommerce industry in Sweden is booming, as its growth continues to increase. Even in the second quarter of this year, which is often a weak quarter, positive numbers continued to show up. Ecommerce in Sweden could face a total growth of 18 percent and a turnover of 37,3 billion Swedish Kronor (€4,3bn) this year.

Online sales in Europe are expected to grow to 188 billion euros in 2013, from 166 billion in 2012. The United Kingdom, Germany and France would remain the biggest online markets by 2018, while online retail sales on the continent are seen doubling to 323 billion euros that year.

It was a good year for the ecommerce industry in the Netherlands. Sales grew with 11 percent in May, compared to the same period one year before. At the same time, the overall retail industry declined with 0.6% in this period. So, hooray for ecommerce!

The United Kingdom, the United States, Germany, France and the Netherlands are the world's most advanced ecommerce countries. That’s what we can conclude after we poked around in the Global Perspective on Retail report by Cushman & Wakefield. Europe is doing very well we might say.

Ecommerce sites in France are hiring more people than the year before and the number of ecommerce jobs is expected to continue to grow in 2013. And that's pretty good news, considering the fact the French economy is officially in recession. While unemployment in the Western-European country is rising, the ecommerce industry continues to be one of the few sectors that created jobs.

Eurostat, the statistical office of the European Union, shared some interesting statistics about the percentage of enterprises' total turnover that contains ecommerce sales. And it´s not the United Kingdom, France of Germany where the contribution of ecommerce to national business revenues is highest. Now, companies based in the Czech Republic and Luxembourg had the highest share last year.

Many ecommerce sites in Europe are loading too slow. Actually, one in three of Europe's top ecommerce sites fail to meet the performance demands of online shoppers. And it’s not a unavoidable problem, many websites could speed up a notch by just implementing some standard performance fixes.

It's going well with ecommerce in Europe. Online revenue of goods and services grew by 19% to reach €311.6 billion last year. The United Kingdom (€96 bln), Germany (€50 bln) and France (€45 bln) together represent 61% of the total European B2C ecommerce sector.

Yeah, you read that correctly. Poland is the fastest-growing ecommerce market in the European Union. And Poland grows really fast, as in 2011 the country, compared to 13 other European countries, ended second-to-last in terms of percentage of retail business done online. And now, according to a report from the Centre for Retail Research, the ecommerce sector in Poland is growing the fastest of them all.

Despite the economic problems Western Europe has to fear, all is still going well on the ecommerce front. According to data from the “European Online Retail Forecast 2012 to 2017” from Forrester Research, European online sales in key markets (the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Sweden and the Netherlands) will rise an average of 12% annually in the aforementioned period.