Ecommerce gained over 5% global penetration in 2020. But how many of these new shoppers continued to use the channel in 2021?
Have the channel dynamics changed?
In every edition of our annual Omnichannel report, online has been the fastest-growing channel globally. Despite a lower level of growth in 2021, this remains the case, growing more than three-times faster than the next best performer, Cash & Carry.
Reflecting the sector performance earlier in the report, every channel has seen a slowdown in growth in 2021 compared to 2020. However, the slowdown of every other channel has been significantly more than that of ecommerce. This has meant that only online has made a significant share gain of +0.9% now worth 7.2% of the global take-home FMCG market.
Hyper & Supermarkets, despite remaining by far the biggest channel, underperform compared to the rest of the market (as in 2020) with growth of +0.1%. It lost 1% of market share.
Ecommerce: The importance of Asia
The share of ecommerce in Asia has always been significantly higher than any other region. At 15.3% share, this is more than double that in Western Europe (6.9%). But what’s even more impressive is the rate of growth in Asia.
There are now 22 markets in which online has a share of 3% or higher – up from 15 in 2020 and just 8 in 2019. But four of the five markets where ecommerce has gained the most all come from Asia. Only Indonesia and rural Vietnam have market share of less than 1%.
In short, Asia accounts for 45% of all online FMCG sales.
Ecommerce: Frequency-led growth
The continued growth of the channel has come from two things. Maintaining the huge increase in shoppers in 2020 and adding to it. Market penetration has risen from 31.6% in 2019 to 37% in 2020, and hit 39.8% in 2021.
But the real driver of growth in 2021 was in purchase frequency, which increased by a greater amount in 2021 than in 2020. Purchase frequency has contributed to a staggering 70% of the channel growth.
While penetration has continued to rise in Asian markets, in Europe penetration has plateaued and has in fact gone down in France. What has not fallen, though, is purchase frequency with this on the rise across both Asia and Europe.
This plateauing in online penetration in Western Europe reflects the value sales, with short-term ecommerce sales showing a decline in Q4 2021 for the first time ever. And it is the older (65+) households that were new to online shopping during 2020 that are the main driver of this decline in GB and Spain.
