Ecommerce Trends and Statistics in Europe, 2026 (With Sources)

Ecommerce statistics travel around the web without a year, a methodology or a base — and a number missing all three tells you very little. This article covers ecommerce trends and statistics for the EU in 2026, and every figure below carries its dataset, its reference year and the group it was calculated on, rather than a shared bibliography at the end. Where two tables seem to answer the same question but don't, we say so instead of picking the more convenient number. Almost all the data comes from Eurostat's ICT surveys, which national statistical offices run in every member state with a common questionnaire, so the figures are comparable across the EU27. The one exception is cart abandonment, where the most widely cited source is the Baymard Institute — global research, not an EU measurement. For what actually counts as e-commerce before the numbers, see what is e-commerce.

How many people in the EU buy online

According to Eurostat's isoc_ec_ib20 dataset (updated 17 April 2026), 73.56% of people aged 16–74 in the EU27 bought something online in the 12 months before the 2025 survey, up from 71.76% in 2024 and 69.6% in 2023. Among internet users the figure is 77.82%, and 62.35% of all 16–74-year-olds had bought online within the last three months. National statistical offices collect these figures for Eurostat with the shared questionnaire, so a national publication and the Eurostat row for the same country normally come from the same survey. Read them as one source, not as two independent confirmations.

The EU27 average hides real differences — between member states and between age groups. In the same table, 83.16% of 16–24-year-olds bought online in 2025, against 44.38% of 65–74-year-olds. If you sell into more than one country, look up that country's row before planning a campaign there; the EU figure describes no single market.

Where Europeans buy from is covered by a separate series, isoc_ec_ibos, which ends with the 2023 survey — so these figures are older than the rest of this article. Of the people who had bought online in the previous three months, 82.96% bought from sellers in their own country, 32.84% from sellers in another EU country and 20.05% from sellers outside the EU; 16.11% bought from sellers whose country they did not know. One person can fall into several groups, so the shares add up to more than 100%. Domestic sellers dominate, but buying from another member state is common enough that cross-border delivery and returns deserve a place in planning, not a footnote.

Ecommerce trends on the seller side: how many EU businesses sell online

Eurostat's isoc_ec_eseln2 table (updated 15 June 2026) covers enterprises with 10 or more persons employed in all activities except agriculture, forestry, fishing, mining and quarrying, and the financial sector. Its "2025" column describes sales made in 2024, because the survey asks about the previous calendar year. In that column, 23.59% of EU27 enterprises had e-commerce sales: 17.72% sold through their own website or app and 9.31% through an e-commerce marketplace — a business can do both.

The broad indicator includes EDI, where orders are generated automatically in computer-to-computer communication and nobody places an individual order. Leave it out and you get enterprises with web sales — through a website, an app or a marketplace — at 20.69%. The gap of 2.9 percentage points between the two indicators is made up of enterprises that sell electronically only via EDI; all enterprises with EDI-type sales, including those that also sell on the web, come to 5.6%. When someone quotes "23.59% of EU businesses sell online", check whether they mean e-commerce sales in general or web sales. The two indicators overlap, but they are not the same.

Web sales as a share of turnover, and who buys most of it

A separate table, isoc_ec_evaln2 (updated 27 February 2026), measures not how many enterprises sell online but how much of their turnover it brings. In its "2025" column (2024 sales), web sales accounted for 8.39% of EU27 enterprise turnover, up from 7.32% a year earlier. Count EDI as well and e-commerce reaches 19.49% of turnover, of which EDI-type sales alone account for 11.07% — more than websites, apps and marketplaces combined. Web sales are therefore still a small part of total turnover, not the main source of revenue.

The value of those web sales splits almost evenly: 51.78% comes from sales to other businesses and the public sector (B2B and B2G), 48.20% from sales to consumers (B2C). A year earlier the B2C share was 46.69%, so the consumer side is growing slightly faster. Even so, contrary to the common picture of e-commerce as consumer shopping, slightly more than half of the value of EU web sales goes to other organisations — with the caveat that these are enterprises with 10 or more persons employed, not the whole market.

Marketplaces versus own online shops

Among enterprises with web sales, 85.65% sell through their own website or app and 45.0% through a marketplace; 14.35% sell only through marketplaces (isoc_ec_eseln2, "2025" column). Measured by value, marketplaces account for 15.54% of EU27 web sales, up from 14.55% a year earlier, while own sites and apps bring in 84.46% (isoc_ec_evaln2). Nearly half of web sellers use a marketplace, then, but most of the money still flows through their own channels. Don't put the two figures side by side as one indicator: one counts enterprises, the other counts euros.

What the EU data doesn't give you is marketplace reach among shoppers — how many people visit marketplaces each month, or how much of their shopping time goes there. National audience-measurement panels publish this for some countries; Eurostat doesn't, so any EU-wide reach figure would have to be made up. Keep in mind, too, that the enterprise figures leave out businesses with fewer than 10 persons employed and private sellers, both of which matter on marketplaces.

How shoppers buy and find products — not measured EU-wide

Which device people finish their purchases on, which delivery method they choose, whether they bought directly on a social platform, how often they read an AI summary when searching for a product — national consumer surveys and panels answer these questions for some countries, each with its own questions, population and year. None of the Eurostat tables used here break purchases down by device, delivery method or discovery channel, so there is no comparable EU27 figure, and this article doesn't stitch national numbers together into one. The direction is easy to see: product discovery is spreading across shop and marketplace search, general search engines, social media and AI tools. How the split looks in your market is a question for a national panel for that market — quoted with its edition year, its base and the wording of the question, the same three things this article attaches to every Eurostat figure.

Trust: what goes wrong when people buy online

Eurostat also asks what goes wrong. In isoc_ec_iprb21 (2025), 35.43% of people who had bought online in the previous three months reported at least one problem. The most common, by a wide margin, was delivery slower than indicated, at 19.92%. Next came a website that was difficult to use or didn't work properly (11.49%), wrong or damaged goods (10.36%), information on guarantees and other legal rights that was hard to find (8.19%), complaints that were difficult to resolve (6.33%), a foreign retailer that didn't sell to the buyer's country (5.36%), a final cost higher than indicated (4.5%) and fraud (3.85%).

These are problems people say they actually ran into, not fears and not a return rate. Read that way, they point to where a shop loses trust in practice: delivery promises and the usability of the site come well ahead of fraud. Clear delivery times you can keep, an easy-to-find returns and guarantee page and a working mobile checkout address more of this list than a lower price would.

Cart abandonment — a number that's easy to misread

The Baymard Institute publishes a figure that puts the average cart-abandonment rate at 70.22% — "an average calculated based on 50 different studies containing statistics on ecommerce shopping cart abandonment" (baymard.com/lists/cart-abandonment-rate, "Last updated: September 22, 2025"). That is an average of studies by different companies, from different years and with different methods, not a single Baymard measurement. Another page from the same institute gives a different number for a similar but not identical measurement: "70.19%", "tracked … for 14 years" (baymard.com/research/checkout-usability). Quote one of the two pages with its own number — don't average them and don't present them as the same measurement.

The figure doesn't mean that seven in ten carts are lost sales. Many abandonments are simply part of how people shop: looking around, comparing prices, saving a product for later. On the same page Baymard reports that 42% of US online shoppers have abandoned a cart because they were "just browsing / not ready to buy" — a US survey, not an EU one. We break down the remaining reasons — extra costs, checkout length, forced account creation — with a source for each in cart abandonment, and don't repeat that table here so that two articles don't carry two slightly different versions of the same numbers.

What these statistics won't tell you about your store

Every number above is an average or a declared answer from a sample your store almost certainly wasn't part of. The average abandonment rate, the share of enterprises selling through a marketplace or the EU-wide problem rate won't tell you whether your checkout works, whether your customers buy cross-border or whether your category sells better on a marketplace or in your own shop. Industry data is good for one thing: checking whether your own figure sits in the normal range or clearly stands out. What to fix comes from your own analytics — abandonment by device, the checkout step where most people leave, and the share of orders from returning customers. For example, the EU27 figure that 19.92% of recent buyers had slower-than-promised deliveries won't tell you whether your own delivery times hold up; your complaint log and carrier data will.

We don't give a value for the EU e-commerce market in euro, because none of the sources used here publish one in a methodology that can be compared year on year across 27 national markets; the estimates that circulate online usually lose their year and their definition along the way. The closest figure is the share above — 8.39% of enterprise turnover from web sales — and it measures a share, not a total. If you are working out the full cost of running a shop, including marketing, logistics and maintenance, use figures for your own project rather than an averaged market. Our online store cost report shows what a line-by-line, sourced cost breakdown looks like — its rates are from the Polish market, so use it as an example of method rather than EU prices — and the e-commerce TCO calculator estimates the cost of running your store over several years, not just the build.