Norway

Ecommerce in Norway is doing well for some time and with a strong fourth quarter it resulted in a 10 billion euros turnover ($10.95 billion) in 2014. Enterprise Federation of Norway expects a growth of 15% which is higher than last year, in which it grew by 10.8%. 

Cross-border ecommerce is growing steadily in the Nordic countries. Especially online stores in Sweden are popular among other Scandinavians. Norwegian consumers shop the most at foreign online stores. Ten percent of all Norwegians shop at Swedish ecommerce sites at some point every quarter.

Seven in ten Nordic residents shopped online for a total value of 4.9 billion euros during the first quarter of this year. The most frequent shoppers can be found in Norway, as 75% of its inhabitants bought something online during the first three months of this year.

Some Nordic retailers are well known from all over the world. Take IKEA, H&M and Oriflame for example. But still, online stores from Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland must think more globally. Nowadays a lot of these sites only provide other Nordic languages and don’t serve markets with high demand.

When does a country have a lot of ecommerce potential? Is it about population size, income per capita or the amount of money online spent? It’s all of these and a lot more variables that characterizes a ecommerce market primed for growth. Forrester compared 55 countries, and of the 10 most ecommerce-ready markets, there are 5 European countries: UK, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden.