These are the 24 most important marketplaces for selling to Switzerland!
Switzerland: A country in the center of Europe with a very engaged and affluent online customer base. But also a country that is not part of the European Union and therefore has its very own way of e-commerce. This requires a special approach to this Marketplace Country Quadrant Switzerland.
Fortunately, we have highly competent local information: Carpathia, the largest Swiss e-commerce consultancy, publishes an annual overview of the top 50 online shops. About 20 of these shops are marketplaces – a very good starting point for our Swiss marketplace country quadrant.
Nevertheless, we are only listing 24 marketplaces in the new version of our Marketplace Country Quadrant Switzerland, instead of 35 as before. The reason for this is that we only show 3 marketplaces in each category because it is often almost impossible for us to clearly decide on providers that we consider to be truly relevant.
The Market
There are currently around 9 million people living in Switzerland. The net household income of 39,697 euros is significantly higher than in other European markets. In Germany, for example, a household has an average of just over 31,000 euros a year at its disposal. The VAT rate in Switzerland is only 8 percent.
The Swiss do comparatively little shopping online, with only 60 percent of the population shopping online. Nevertheless, online retail generated a turnover of 14.4 billion euros in 2023. That is 3 percent more than in 2022. The top 5 online stores in Switzerland are Galaxus, digitech.ch, Zalando, Brack.ch and Apple. This is also reflected in the strongest e-commerce categories: electronics, fashion, and hobby & leisure. We do not have specific figures on the market share of online marketplaces.
The generalists in the Marketplace Country Quadrant Switezrland
However, sales made online are heavily dominated by marketplaces. According to Carpathia, all of the top 5 stores in Switzerland are marketplaces.
The most dominant generalist platform is a local player: Digitec Galaxus AG. The platform dominates most categories. And it has successfully resisted Amazon ‘s various attempts to reach Swiss customers via Amazon’s country offices in Germany, France and Italy.
Marketplaces eBay and AliExpress also play an important role in the Swiss market, while local player Ricardo AG is the C2C leader, which also has a significant number of B2C sellers.
The leading Marketplaces in the 6 categories
- A look at the category table shows the strength of Zalando in Switzerland. In fact, with a turnover of 1.65 billion euros, the platform is the number 1 among the country’s top e-commerce providers. Its turnover even tops that of the local top dog Galaxus.
- The overview also includes several local players that are not very well known outside Switzerland but are very important for Swiss online customers. This applies, for example, to digitec and Manor in the Electronics category, but also to Globus, which is strongly represented in the Home & Living and Beauty & Care categories.
- And we also see that the Chinese players are already very present on the Swiss market. Temu entered Carpathia’s Top 50 list this year with a direct jump to 9th place. This could lead to even greater shifts in the Swiss marketplace landscape in the future.
The Changes
Due to the focus on only three players per category, some marketplaces have of course been left out of the overview. In the Fashion sector, for example, About You and Manor, in the categories Electronics and Home & Living Temu and Conforama. Fruugo has been dropped from DIY & Garden, and we have removed VidalXL because the provider now only focuses on dropshipping. In the Sports sector, we have dispensed with fnac and Manor, and in the Beauty & Care category, we have left out Globus and Temu.