These are the 35 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 had highly competent and very fresh local input: Carpathia, the largest Swiss e-commerce consultancy, published its annual overview of the top 50 online stores last week. Around 20 of these stores are marketplaces – a very good starting point for our Marketplace Country Quadrant Switzerland.
The starting position in Switzerland
In Switzerland, e-commerce sales will reach CHF 14.1 billion (EUR 14.48) in 2023. This corresponds to an increase of 3 percent compared to a weaker 2022. The Swiss population is less inclined to shop online than other European populations. The online sector accounts for only around 12% of total retail sales.
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.