New e-commerce study: A monopoly on the rise?

The dominance of The Four – Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Google – keeps increasing. From 2013 to 2017, their combined market capitalisation has increased by 1.4 trillion dollars. To put this in perspective, it is an amount corresponding to the total GDP of Russia. When we take a look at the state of e-commerce in the US and UK, it is easy to spot why Amazon is among ‘the fab four’.

In the US and UK online shopping space, the dominance of Amazon is now almost total. Today, 60% of all online transactions in the States are happening on Amazon’s platform, and it is not far behind in the UK with more than 40% of online transactions. This gives Amazon an extremely powerful position in these markets as it makes their partner platform crucial for almost any kind of online retailer.

The Nordics up next?

While Amazon is approaching a monopoly-like status online in the US and UK, we see a completely different picture in the Nordics. In both Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Finland, a wide range of online shops are battling for the market lead.

However, with Amazon’s expected entrance in the Nordics next year, this can change fast. Among others, the CEO of Pricerunner, Nicklas Storåkers, has no doubt about what will happen if Amazon arrives: “Then we’re all dead. All e-commerce players will become slaves under Amazon”.

Wish and eBay also in top

Besides Amazon, we see that Wish and eBay are among the other winners in the e-commerce industry. Although none of them are nowhere near the size of Amazon, it is obvious that Wish has managed to carve out a niche with their low price offering in both the US, UK and Nordics, while eBay still has a solid market position with their C2C and B2C facilitator platform.

Mobile online shopping doubled

An interesting question is how the ongoing mobile transformation of the e-commerce industry will affect the picture of the online shopping space. The mobile as a shopping platform has doubled in just two years across all the Nordic markets, and now up to half of the online population uses the small screen for online shopping.

With that said, we see that the computer is still the preferred device to do the actual transaction – at least for the time being.

Get further insights

In the study below, you can learn more about the state of e-commerce in the US, UK and Nordics. Enjoy!