In Denmark, most people shop on brand-owned web stores which is why only a small portion of online sales happen through large third-party platforms. The main explanation is that major players like eBay, Alibaba, Tao Bao and Amazon haven’t entered the Danish market. Yet…

Taking a look just South of the Danish border, the picture changes dramatically. In countries like Germany, France, England and Spain, people are mass consumers of e-commerce platforms like Zalando and Amazon to buy everything from groceries to Christmas presents and furniture.

Amazon is one of the top three best-selling sites in Denmark – a rather remarkable achievement considering Amazon doesn’t have a site in Danish and has spent virtually no money on advertisement.

In Germany and France, 30% of all online sales happen on Amazon. In the UK, Amazon “only” controls 25% of the market. One would expect that these market shares stayed somewhat constant over time with limited yearly growth – but this is far from the case. Amazon had a 20% revenue increase in Germany from 2015 to 2016 (USD 11.8 billion to USD 14.1 billion), and they have shown no signs of slowing down.

The Danish market is slowly starting to feel the impact of the larger players winning terrain. The fear of Amazon has reached a point where Danish Supermarkets/Salling Group has proposed to establish a collective Danish e-commerce portal to rival the American platform.

At be-ahead, we don’t believe that large e-commerce platforms are a threat to Danish companies, on the contrary, sites like Amazon provide new market opportunities and major growth potential for businesses. Choosing to sell on Amazon doesn’t mean closing your own webshop but you need to consider whether Amazon could give you added revenue through new customers you otherwise wouldn’t have reached with your existing sales strategy. By listing your products on Amazon, you will access 340 million online customers in Europe at the click of a button.

The future is on Amazon.