Global online FMCG sales rose by 20.3% last year, with e-commerce now accounting for 5.1% of grocery sales worldwide, new data from Kantar has found.
Growth was driven by the US and mainland China, Kantar’s data found, which together represent 84% of the growth in global e-commerce.
Growth Focus
The best-performing European country, the study found, was Italy, which saw 26.3% growth in FMCG e-commerce last year.
Germany saw online FMCG sales growth of 11.5%, Spain was up by 9.1%, France rose by 5.7% and the UK was up 3.5%.
In Western Europe, 4.1% of grocery sales came through e-commerce, last year, Kantar said.
In Eastern Europe, however, online FMCG is less developed, accounting for just 1.9% of sales in 2018.
Pure Players
‘Globally, it is the online pure players like Amazon, Alibaba and JD.com which are winning in the e-commerce market as they continue to attract new shoppers,’ Kantar said in its report.
‘Pure players now represent 72% of online sales, posting a staggering collective growth of 29% in 2018. In the face of this competition, retailers operating across both bricks and mortar and e-commerce channels grew by only 3% in comparison, though reducing the delivery delay and offering free, or cheaper, options would help multi-channel retailers to close this gap.’
© 2019 European Supermarket Magazine – your source for the latest retail news. Article by Stephen Wynne-Jones. Click subscribe to sign up to ESM: European Supermarket Magazine.
