Insights

The E-barometer presents e-commerce trends for the second quarter, based on data from Swedish e-retailers and analysis across eight sectors. This edition focuses on the consumer journey, covering payments, deliveries, and returns.

Selecting the right international shipping carrier is a crucial step for ensuring that your global customers receive their orders quickly and reliably. For e-commerce businesses, finding a carrier that balances delivery speed, cost, and exceptional service is key to customer satisfaction.

Expanding your e-commerce business into the Nordic region—comprising Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Finland—offers significant opportunities due to its high digital adoption, tech-savvy population, and strong purchasing power. This strategic guide will help you in managing the complexities of exporting to the Nordics, optimize your logistics, and effectively reach Nordic consumers.

PostNord provides a complete set of APIs designed to automate, optimize, and enhance your shipping processes. Each API is built to simplify logistics, offer flexible delivery options, and improve customer experience, making them essential tools for scaling your e-commerce business.

The Nordic region is rapidly transforming the logistics industry through smart logistics innovations, focusing on sustainability, cutting-edge technologies, and digitalization. As the logistics sector evolves, these trends are reshaping how goods are transported and delivered, creating more efficient and sustainable systems.

While better times may be ahead, this is not yet fully reflected in e-commerce. Growth for the quarter is admittedly positive, but only amounts to a modest one percent. 

The latest E-commerce in the Nordics report reveals that Nordic consumers embrace the convenience and accessibility of online shopping from various countries worldwide. 

In the second occurrence of negative growth in E-barometer history, e-commerce experienced a slight decline, with a full-year development landing at minus 2% in 2023. While brighter than the 2022 decline of 7%, it still indicates a challenging year for online commerce.

The online clothing and footwear industry remains resilient, thriving throughout 2023.

In 2023, it became evident that consumers have diverse preferences for delivery methods. These varying preferences set expectations for e-tailers to provide a broad range of delivery options, which significantly impacts consumers' purchasing choices.

The most recent E-barometer conducted an extensive examination of both Black Week and the Christmas retail landscape. The report highlighted promising outlooks for online shopping leading up to the holiday season. Post-Black Week analysis revealed 34 percent of sales during the event were attributed to purchases intended as Christmas gifts.

Among negative development figures, there is one industry that has stood strong – the pharmacy industry grew by 10 percent in 2022.

The furniture and interior design industry is one of the industries that faces high comparative figures after having performed strongly during the pandemic.

2022 has been a tough year for the sports trade. As in many other sub-sectors, rising inflation and interest rates, war and the state of the economy have left their mark.

The year 2021 was a record year for the printed book in both physical and e-commerce. However, 2022 has not looked as positive for the industry.