When asked about what keeps infrequent shoppers from buying online, there are clear differences in Europe. German consumers in particular have comparatively few reservations about e-commerce, even if they do not order online regularly. This is the result of a Eurostat survey of European customers whose online purchases date back more than three months. The results were presented in the new European E-Commerce Report 2022 of the European umbrella organizations Ecommerce Europe and EuroCommerce.
While an average of 54 percent of infrequent shoppers in the EU stated that they consciously prefer to shop in stores – either out of habit, loyalty to retailers or to test products – the figure in Germany is only 38 percent. This is the third lowest figure in the EU-27 behind Hungary (21 percent) and Ireland (31 percent). In the Netherlands (85 percent), Spain (83 percent) and Croatia (82 percent) in particular, few-order customers prefer to support brick-and-mortar stores instead of going online.
The quality of retailers, payment service providers and delivery staff is convincing to German consumers. Just 2 percent of German infrequent shoppers said they avoided e-commerce because of delivery quality (EU-27 average: 9 percent). Only 8 percent of the few customers are deterred by concerns about the lack of payment security and data protection on the Internet. On average in the EU-27, this figure is more than twice as high (18 percent). Consumer concern about delivery quality and data privacy is highest in Portugal (38 percent and 69 percent agreement, respectively).
“The results show the high performance of the industry in Germany, but also how normal and low-threshold ordering in e-commerce has become. As a result, we observe that Germans are ordering more frequently every year and are increasingly using e-commerce for their daily supplies,” explains Martin Groß-Albenhausen, Deputy Chief Executive Officer at bevh.
bevh’s own data underscores this picture: for its ongoing study on interactive commerce in Germany, the association asks consumers every week about their ordering frequency and found in 2021 that an average of 43.6 percent had shopped online within the last 7 days (2017: 38 percent). Of these, almost 41 percent actually ordered more than once during this period (2017: 32.2 percent of all customers who purchased in the last 7 days).
