Temu was the largest online retailer in Finland, Croatia, Hungary and Slovenia in 2025, according to ECDB, and second in eight more European countries. None of the four markets it leads has a local Amazon store.
That is the whole finding, and it moves Temu out of the price-war conversation and into a market-structure one. Temu is not beating Amazon in Europe. It is winning the countries Amazon never opened.
What the data says
ECDB’s own publication is direct: “In Finland, Croatia, Hungary and Slovenia, Temu is now the largest e-commerce retailer.” It places Temu second in France, Portugal, Norway, Bulgaria, Greece, Austria, Czechia and Slovakia.
Trade coverage adds that Temu “has broken into the top 10 online retailers in almost every European country”, which is the more remarkable sentence of the two given the platform launched in Europe in 2023.
One label has to travel with all of this. ECDB states plainly, “These are 2025 figures.” This is a calendar-2025 ranking published in September 2026, not a reading of where the market sits today, and it predates every cost change described below.
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The pattern in the four
Amazon’s own global selling material names ten European stores: the UK, France, Belgium, Spain, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Sweden and Turkey. Finland, Croatia, Hungary and Slovenia are not among them.
Shoppers in those countries can and do buy from Amazon’s other European stores, but there is no local storefront, no local-language marketplace built for them and no domestic marketplace of comparable scale. Into that space, an app with aggressive pricing and no requirement for local retail infrastructure does not have to beat an incumbent. It only has to be the most convenient thing available.
Compare that with Poland, where Allegro holds a dominant domestic position and Temu is not first, or with Germany and France, where Amazon runs a local store and Temu sits second at best. The pattern holds in both directions: where a serious marketplace already serves a country in its own language, Temu places well and does not lead. Where none does, it leads.
This is the part that should interest a European brand more than the ranking itself. Temu did not win those four markets with a better proposition than Amazon’s. It won them in Amazon’s absence, which means the position is a function of who else turned up rather than of what Temu built.
The trajectory is the harder number
Four first places is the headline. Top-ten presence in almost every European country is the finding with more in it, because it describes reach rather than a handful of outcomes, and reach is what precedes share.
A platform that is top ten nearly everywhere has cleared the hardest part of European market entry, which is being known and being tried. What it does with that position depends on things this data does not measure: whether it can hold the price advantage that produced the trial, and whether the shoppers who tried it return.
Tool comparison · FastMoss vs Kalodata
Rankings tell you who is winning a market. They do not tell you which products are moving in it, which is the question that decides whether a listing is worth building. FastMoss and Kalodata both break social commerce demand down to product level by market.
Comparison coming soon
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What the ranking does not tell you
No money appears anywhere in this. ECDB publishes a position, not a size, and neither the underlying release nor the trade coverage attaches a turnover figure, a visitor count or a market share percentage to any of the twelve countries named.
The sharper gap is that the metric itself is never stated. “Largest e-commerce retailer” could mean gross merchandise value, net revenue, orders or visitors, and those four rankings would not necessarily put the same platform first in the same country. Without the metric, first place is a claim about an order, not about a quantity, and there is no way to check it or to compare it against a figure from anywhere else.
That matters because a first place in Slovenia and a first place in Germany would mean very different things, and the ranking cannot distinguish them. Four national number-one positions in four of Europe’s smaller markets is a real result and a narrower one than the headline suggests.
It also says nothing about category. A platform can lead a market on general merchandise while being irrelevant in the categories a particular brand sells into. Before anyone treats a Temu listing as necessary, the question is whether Temu leads in the market or in the category, and this data answers only the first.
The cost base underneath is about to move
The reason this ranking should not be read as a forecast is that the economics that produced it are changing. Since 1 July 2026 a flat 3 euro customs duty has applied per item on consignments up to 150 euros entering the EU, after the 150 euro exemption was abolished. From November an EU-wide handling fee is added on top, with the amount still to be set by the Commission.
A fixed per-item charge is regressive against order value, so it falls hardest on exactly the low-priced, direct-shipped goods that built these positions. The markets where Temu has the most share are also the markets where it has the most to lose from a charge that does not care what an item costs.
Whether that changes the ranking depends on something nobody can read from this data, which is how much of Temu’s European volume now ships from stock already inside the EU. That number is not published.
Tool comparison · FastMoss vs Kalodata
When a cost change hits a competitor, the first visible signal is their pricing, not their press office. Tracking competitor prices by product across the autumn is the cheapest early warning available. FastMoss and Kalodata both keep pricing history at product level.
Comparison coming soon
FTC disclosure: we may earn a commission if you buy through links on this page. It costs you nothing and does not change what we recommend.
For the business operator
Use this as a channel-gap map rather than a threat assessment. If you sell into Finland, Croatia, Hungary or Slovenia and your plan has been to reach those customers through a larger Amazon store, this says your customers are shopping somewhere else and have been for a year.
Check the eight second-place countries as carefully as the four. France sits in that list, and a strong second position in France is commercially larger than a first position in Slovenia.
Before building a Temu listing, establish whether the platform leads in your category in your market. The ranking is general merchandise, and a brand that sells into a specialist category can be looking at a number that has nothing to do with it.
From the consumer’s side
Nobody in Zagreb or Helsinki chose Temu over Amazon. They chose it over what was locally available, which in a market with no local marketplace of scale is a thinner set of options than shoppers in Germany or France ever have to work with.
That has a consequence for anyone arriving late. Customers acquired in the absence of an alternative are not loyal to the platform, they are loyal to the convenience, and they move when something better arrives in their language with delivery they can predict. The switching cost is low in both directions, which is the opportunity and also the reason to expect any position won there to need defending.
The three-line version
If you run European expansion or the marketplace portfolio, treat the four leading markets and the eight second-place markets as a gap map and check whether you currently reach any of them at all. The line to take upward is that four national number-one positions are real but sit in small markets, and the French second place is worth more than all four.
If you have just taken on European strategy, the gap this exposes is that most country plans are built around the five large Amazon stores, and simply have no entry for the dozen European markets where Amazon has no local storefront. Those markets have marketplaces. They are just not the ones on the plan.
If you sign the budget, nothing here justifies spend on its own. This is calendar-2025 ranking data with no revenue attached, published against a cost base that changes in November. Refuse any market-entry proposal that cites a number-one position without a market size next to it.
Sources
ECDB, Temu ranks first in four European markets — https://ecdb.com/blog/temu-s-first-rank/5260
Ecommerce News Europe — https://ecommercenews.eu/temu-ranks-first-in-four-european-ecommerce-markets/
Amazon global selling, marketplaces — https://sell.amazon.com/global-selling
European Commission, DG Taxation and Customs Union, EU customs reform — https://taxation-customs.ec.europa.eu/customs/eu-customs-reform_en