E-commerce reaches record level

From food, electronics and furniture to clothing - one in seven euros ended up in the tills of online retailers last year. This is shown by the latest Surveys of the German E-Commerce and Distance Selling Trade Association (bevh).

Retail without e-commerce is already unthinkable, neither for consumers nor for retailers, explains bevh President Gero Furchheim. Gross sales of goods in e-commerce rose by 19% to €99.1 billion in 2021. Of this, 40.2% was generated via mobile devices. Despite the decline in sales of digital services, the total volume amounted to more than 107 billion euros.

It's not just the younger generation that stores online

Initially, it was mainly younger people who used online shopping, but in 2021 shoppers aged 50 and over were responsible for at least half of all online purchases. This means that online retail has reached the broad masses of the population across all generations. The high level of customer satisfaction is also remarkable: the proportion of "satisfied" and "very satisfied" online shoppers reached a new record high of 96.3%. This means that never before have so many people in Germany shopped so much online and expressed such a high level of satisfaction.

Social media as a gateway to retail

The increasing use of smartphones also increased the sales volume of mobile commerce by 56.5% to EUR 39.9 billion. This corresponds to a good 40 percent of total e-commerce sales. This will also change the way online retail looks in the coming years, explains Martin Groß-Albenhausen, Deputy Managing Director of bevh. Website stores will lose relevance in the future.

Online retailers need to adapt to this change, says fynax head Saravanan Sundaram. Many customers are increasingly getting relevant information from social media. This sales channel offers new retailers in particular the opportunity to position themselves against existing players. It is important to make your channels/offer visually appealing. Like with the Live shoppingwhere influencers show products in real time in a live stream in front of the camera. These rapid developments not only show that people have built up trust in e-commerce, but also that the future of retail thinks, learns and works digitally.