Germany's online sales in Q3 exceeded 20 billion euros, the fastest growth in 5 years

The survey results show that although restrictions on physical retail have been relaxed and more people are going out to shop, the growth trend of Germany's e-commerce industry has not been broken. Germany's online sales in the third quarter reached 22.194 billion euros , an increase of 14.8% from the third quarter of 2020, the largest growth rate in the past five years.

In terms of product categories, the biggest growth drivers in the third quarter were food, DIY products and flowers, hobbies and leisure products, and medicines, with sales growth of 34.5%, 30.1%, 23.8%, and 22.3%, respectively. The fastest-growing commodity group was daily necessities, including food, drugstore products, and pet food. This means that during the epidemic, online transactions for products that can be purchased in physical stores have grown particularly strongly.

At the same time, digital sales of services such as travel or event tickets, which fell sharply last year due to travel bans and event cancellations, recovered to 2.23 billion euros in the third quarter, an increase of 31% compared to the third quarter of 2020, but are still far from pre-epidemic levels.

In terms of sales channels, multichannel retailers had the strongest revenue growth in the third quarter, reaching 21.2%, followed by direct-to-consumer manufacturers (D2C) (20.5%), e-commerce platforms (15.3%), pure Internet operators (11.5%), and telephone shopping suppliers (-16.6%).

The survey said that D2C is the only sales channel that has continued to grow by double digits every quarter since the outbreak. If we only look at the most recent third quarter, multi-channel retailers have the strongest growth. This is because since the beginning of the year, most retailers have opened their physical stores, but since consumers still prefer to order online, online sales have increased.

Bevh Managing Director Christoph Wenk-Fischer said that many offline retailers established online sales during the epidemic, and the positive development of multi-channel retailers contributed to the industry's strong performance, which was particularly gratifying.

Germany

Online Sales