Market power continues to increase: Top online retailers are crushing the competition

The 1000 largest online retailers on the German market will be able to sell significantly more in 2021 than before.

Market power continues to increase: Top online retailers are crushing the competition

The 1000 largest online retailers on the German market will be able to sell significantly more in 2021 than before. It is noticeable that the top 10 in particular benefit. They increase their share of online trade again. Almost every fifth euro flows into Amazon's pockets alone.

The top dogs Amazon and Otto continue to dominate online retail in Germany. The two Internet giants would have maintained their position as the online retailers with the highest sales in Germany in 2021, said Lars Hofacker, head of the e-commerce research department at the Cologne trade research institute EHI. Electronics retailer mediamarkt.de secured third place in the ranking of online retailers, pushing online fashion retailer Zalando down to fourth place.

The 1000 largest online shops increased their sales by 16.1 percent to 79.9 billion euros last year, said Hofacker. The lion's share of the business - at least 41.1 percent of sales - was secured by the ten largest e-commerce retailers, which according to EHI, in addition to Amazon, Otto and Media Markt, also include Zalando, Ikea, Saturn, Apple, Lidl, H

"Overall, market concentration in German online retail has continued to increase," said Hofacker. The market leader Amazon alone claimed almost a fifth of the sales of the top 1000 for itself. Bucking the trend, its market share fell by 0.6 percentage points to 19.6 percent. Ikea recorded the strongest growth among the top 10. The Swedish furniture manufacturer was able to more than double its e-commerce sales in Germany within a year. Apple and Doc Morris also outperformed.

Overall, there were only a few serious shifts in the ranking of the largest online retailers in 2021. The only new addition to the top 20 was the fashion retailer Breuninger, which pushed out the home improvement store operator Hornbach.

According to Hofacker, online marketplaces remain popular in Germany. Here Amazon dominated the market with a turnover of 46.2 billion euros. Ebay and Otto followed a long way behind. Of the 1,000 largest online shops, 544 also had physical stores.