EU Online Retailing 2011: Sizes & Forecasts Release date: June 2nd, 2011 (57 pages) PDF/Powerpoint format. Price: GBP990.00 PDF brochure Buy

Abstract

The broad development in online retailing over the 2005-15 period can be characterised as moving from multichannel in 2005 to m-commerce in 2010 and towards internationalisation by 2015. As such a massive prize awaits the winning retail players, serving potential customers across the whole EU market or 126m connected households as of 2010. We forecast that this number will gently rise to 163m households over the next 5 years.

While much of the historic growth of online retailing has been driven by increasing broadband penetration, the rapid growth spurt is now over. Broadband penetration rates will soon reach a natural ceiling in most of the more advanced online markets of north and western Europe. This means that retailers now have to focus on driving average basket sizes up. On top of this the competitive environment has become considerably tougher with the number of online retail businesses soaring across the EU over the last decade. Arguably, this is another reason why retailers need to think beyond the national online market and in a true paradigm change need to adopt a pan EU perspective.

We expect the nature of online retailing to change significantly going forward, current cross border shopping trends are set to intensify, especially where linguistic similarities exist, so for example in France, (Walloon) Belgium and (non EU) Switzerland; Germany and Austria; Holland and (Flamish) Belgium and so on.

For online retailing the future is rosy, and by 2015 we expect the retail universe to have considerably moved closer to a reality where EU shoppers order their wine, fine foods and clothes from Italy, France and Spain, their furniture from Scandinavia, DIY equipment and musical instruments from Germany and CEE, books and DVDs from the UK, etc whilst other sectors such as consumer electronics and media will become even more globalised than they currently are.

Learn – which EU online markets are growth hotspots, laggards and how the sizes will have developed by 2015
Target – the most promising future markets and understand where you have to play in future to win
Assess – the potential, as more EU household move online and see what spend can be tapped

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