Ecommerce in Finland breaks all previous records

Online stores in Finland have broken all the previous records during the end of 2017. The number of online orders increased by 8.2 percent during the last quarter, compared to the same period in 2016. And sales increased by 9.4 percent during the same period.

This was brought to us by Vilkas Group, an ecommerce solution provider from Finland. It studied the local ecommerce industry and found out that overall, the ecommerce index in Finland increased by 8.7 percent and ended on an all-time high of 2787 points. Last year, the growth for the whole year was 10 percent compared to 2016.

Finnish postal agency Posti delivered over 37 million packages last year, which is a new record for the company, thanks to the many online shopping that took place during the Christmas period. Compared to 2016, Posti’s parcel volume increased by 9 percent.

Ecommerce in Finland performed ‘surprisingly well’

According to Vilkas Group, the statistics from Posti show that the ecommerce in Finland has performed “surprisingly well” against the pressure from big foreign online stores. “We have worryingly followed the entry of Chinese web shops in Finland, but now it seems ecommerce in Filand has followed the growth rate really well since the statistics from Posti also includes the increased volumes of parcels from foreign web shops”, CEO Markku Korkiakoski says.

If we dive deeper into the numbers, we’ll see that in December, the number of orders grew 9.2 percent compared to the same month in 2016. But at the same time, the sales in euros during this month only increased by 3 percent. The low increase in sales could be explained by Finnish online retailiners being forced to respond to the aggressive pricing from foreign competitors, Korkiakoski thinks.

“Customers are sensitive to prices and usually buy from the cheapest place they can find, so Finnish retailers have had to start selling with a smaller margin. But in the light of this favorable trend of order volumes it seems this counterattack by Finnish ecommerce has been successful and the growth of order volumes has stayed in the same rate as for foreign operators.”