Infographic: German e-commerce market in figures

Almost half of Germans shop online

The fact that online retail is doing so well is mainly due to the increasing digitalisation of retail and the ever-growing online affinity of Germans. Most customers - almost 42 percent - shopped online at least once a month last year. They mainly ordered clothes, electrical appliances and PC games as well as computer accessories. And increasingly popular: groceries. Germans - especially German men - increasingly like to do their grocery shopping online, which has given the segment a growth spurt of more than 26 percent. Compared to countries like the USA or China, we are still far behind, but the future is promising.

Traditional B2B companies are becoming more digital

But it is not only business with end customers that is becoming increasingly digital. Business in the B2B sector is also shifting more and more to the internet. This is primarily based on the fact that traditional companies are now also increasingly conducting their direct sales via the internet.*
We took a close look at this development together with Adnymics and used it as a starting point to supplement the picture of the e-commerce market in 2016 with figures from our own databases. The result is a whole series of interesting fun facts:

Weighted deliveries: In 2016, the city of Berlin was virtually shipped twice

As already mentioned, online retail is booming. The logical consequence of this is that, of course, more and more parcels are being sent in Germany. Last year, a total of over three billion parcels were sent! If you put them all together on a scale, the weight would be twice that of the city of Berlin: 3.9 billion tonnes. Or to put it another way: if you lined up all the parcels sent every day, you could cover the distance from Oslo to Cyprus - every day.

Parcel couriers overcome 500 metres of altitude every day

To deliver all these parcels, parcel carriers cover an enormous distance during their shift: they cover about 14 kilometres every day and have to climb an average of about 500 metres in altitude to deliver a total of 3-5 tonnes of parcels to their recipients. In the process, about 770,000 parcels are returned by customers every day - a good half.

* You can read all the figures in the two studies "Interactive Commerce in Germany B2C" by the German E-Commerce and Distance Selling Trade Association (bevh) and "The German Internet Industry 2015-2019" by the German Internet Industry Association Eco and Arthur D. Little.