54% of German e-commerce sales were generated via online marketplaces in 2023 – according to the HDE in the new edition of its Online Monitor 2024. And – spoiler- Amazon dominates the German market.
Amazon is THE dominant player
Anyone who has been following our marketplace reporting for some time will know that the overview of sales shares by channel from the Online Monitor is our favorite graphic. It simply shows at a glance,
1. how incredibly dominant Amazon is in German e-commerce and
2. how difficult it is to do without online marketplaces in the sales mix.
But let’s start from the beginning: according to the study recently presented by HDE and IFH Cologne, German e-commerce sales in 2023 amounted to 85.4 billion euros, around 1% more than in the previous year.
Why figures are so different
Disclaimer: This figure differs significantly from the bevh’s calculation, which predicted a 1.8% decline in sales for German e-commerce in 2023. The reasons for the differences are complicated and lie in the methodology… To put it simply, the bevh surveys German online consumers once a week about their online spending, while the HDE surveys German companies once a year about their online revenue (B2C). If consumers do not admit that they shopped at Temu again last week and companies attribute their cross-border sales to German society, discrepancies arise between the two perspectives.
60 % for Amazon
A whopping 60 percent of these 85.4 billion euros are generated on Amazon.de – you have to let that melt in your mouth. 17 percent is accounted for by Amazon’s own business (own brands + vendors), 43 percent is generated via the Marketplace (sellers). And according to the HDE, the other marketplaces such as ebay, Otto, Kaufland, Zalando, Douglas, MediaMarktSaturn… account for just 11% of e-commerce sales – or 9.3 billion euros.
Conclusion
This means that the marketplace business model’s share of sales in German e-commerce has once again risen slightly – but almost only Amazon has been able to secure additional market share. Nevertheless, the other marketplaces also increased their sales – or to put it another way:
Online growth in Germany in 2023 took place on Amazon and a few other marketplaces. Nowhere else.
