The top dogs Amazon and Otto continue to dominate online retail in Germany. The two internet giants would have maintained their position as the online retailers with the highest turnover in Germany in 2021, said the head of the e-commerce research department at the Cologne trade research institute EHI, Lars Hofacker, the German Press Agency. Electronics retailer mediamarkt.de secured third place in the ranking of online retailers, pushing online fashion retailer Zalando down to fourth place.
The 1000 largest online shops increased their sales by 16.1 percent to 79.9 billion euros last year, said Hofacker. The lion’s share of the business – at least 41.1 percent of sales – was secured by the ten largest e-commerce retailers, which according to EHI, in addition to Amazon, Otto and Media Markt, also include Zalando, Ikea, Saturn, Apple, Lidl, H&M and die Internet pharmacy belonging to Doc Morris. The market share of the top 10 was thus once again higher than in the previous year. It was still 40 percent. “Overall, market concentration in German online retail has continued to increase,” said Hofacker.
The market leader Amazon alone claimed almost a fifth of the sales of the top 1000 for itself. Bucking the trend, its market share fell by 0.6 percentage points to 19.6 percent. Ikea recorded the strongest growth among the top 10. The Swedish furniture manufacturer was able to more than double its e-commerce sales in Germany within a year. Apple and Doc Morris also outperformed.
Breuninger new in the top 20
Overall, there were only a few serious shifts in the ranking of the largest online retailers in 2021. The only new addition to the top 20 was the fashion retailer Breuninger, which pushed out the home improvement store operator Hornbach.
According to Hofacker, online marketplaces remain popular in Germany. Here Amazon dominated the market with a turnover of 46.2 billion euros. Ebay and Otto followed a long way behind. Of the 1,000 largest online shops, 544 also had physical stores. (dpa)