Online retail in Germany is suffering from the slump in consumption and there is no rapid improvement in sight. This emerges from the study “E-Commerce Market Germany 2023” published on Wednesday by the Cologne retail research institute EHI. According to this, the 1,000 online shops with the highest sales suffered a decline in sales last year for the first time since the study began in 2008. And this year too, the EHI expects “the downward trend to continue,” as the head of the e-commerce research department, Lars Hofacker, reported.
After the dramatic growth of online trading in the first year of the Corona pandemic in 2020, when sales rose by 33.1 percent, and after an increase of another 16.1 percent in the second Corona year of 2021, the nominal – i.e. not price-adjusted – Net sales of the top 1000 fell for the first time last year by 2.8 percent to 77.7 billion euros, the EHI reported.
And this year too, the experts expect a further decline in online trading. The only question is how big the minus will be. In the best case, a decline in sales of 4.2 percent can be expected, in the worst case, a decline of 16.9 percent, the EHI predicted.
According to the study, Amazon remains the undisputed number one of the largest online shops in Germany, followed by Otto and Zalando. What is striking, however, according to EHI, is that last year, unlike in the past, the market concentration in German online trading fell slightly. Large online shops in particular would have had to cope with a decline in sales. Many smaller shops, on the other hand, were able to increase their sales despite the adverse circumstances. (dpa)