E-COMMERCE AND DIGITAL MARKETING IN EUROPE

In the last 5 years e-commerce in Europe has seen a constant and impressive growth; according to data, in 2017 the turnover of online purchases increased by 11% and is expected to grow by 13% in 2018, making it worth 602 billion euros.

This double digit increase gives us an idea of the fully unexplored potential of online sales, especially when compared to the figures of traditional retail, which is struggling with cloures and job losses.

Thanks to its high spending power, good infrastructures and wide Internet penetration, Europe represents a fertile ground for e-commerce giants like Amazon, e-Bay and Aliexpress which are nowadays the top three competing platforms in the European Union.

Among the vastity of information, what immediately catches the eye is the heterogeneity of e-commerce diffusion throughout the continent: Western Countries lead the pole with a 15.2% of online percentage market share recorded in 2015 the UK, while Southern Countries still performed very poorly (2.5% in Italy).

However, Mediterranean countries are recovering, showing the highest growth rate on online shopping ( +19% in Italy in 2015)

Looking at the purchasing decisions, it is not surprising that clothes and footwear, followed by electronics and books are still the best sellers, but trends say that in the future the market will be led by travelling, while groceries are expected to become a consistent share of the online shopping decisions.

However, it’s not all a bed of roses: when asked about the most common complaints, experts say that the top 3 are all related to delivery, so one of the most important topic to address for an e-commerce platform deciding whether to invest in a country or not is to look at the logistics performance index drafted every year by the World Bank .

From the marketing point of view, e-commerce is an exciting challenge too: online strategies have little to share with traditional ones.

As an example analytics and avertising tools provided by social media give marketing manager the opportunity to tailor their messages and promotions on the preferences of different audiences, but the future range of opportunities offered by big data is even hard to predict.

Managing all these information in a profitable manner in order to design communication and marketing strategies is one the key competences of the recent and increasingly researched figure of the digital marketing manager, a professional profile for which specific universities courses are flourishing and is expected to become crucial in the next years.

Sources:

https://ecommercenews.eu/ecommerce-in-europe-was-worth-e534-billion-in-2017/

https://ecommercenews.eu/ecommerce-per-country/ecommerce-in-europe/#customers

https://een.ec.europa.eu/sites/default/files/een_guide_ecommerce_2018.pdf

https://ecommercenews.eu/ecommerce-per-country/ecommerce-italy/

https://www.notiziegeopolitiche.net/e-commerce-in-europa-un-mercato-da-534-miliardi-di-dollari/