European e-commerce turnover reached 911 billion euros in 2025, up from 842 billion. That is 7 percent growth on paper and 4 percent once inflation is stripped out. A plan built on the first number and delivered against the second will miss, and the shortfall will get blamed on execution.
There is a second trap underneath the first, and it has caught most of the coverage. The regional growth rates everyone is quoting are nominal. The report publishes no inflation adjustment for any individual region, so the regional league table cannot be restated in the terms the same report tells you to plan in.
The split, and what it is measured in
The 2026 European E-commerce Report, published jointly by Ecommerce Europe and EuroCommerce, breaks growth down by region. In the report’s own wording, Western Europe “recorded the lowest nominal B2C e-commerce turnover growth at 5%”, with “Northern Europe grew by 6% while Central Europe increased by 8%” and growth “strongest in Southern (11%) and Eastern Europe (14%)”.
Every one of those is a nominal figure. The only inflation-adjusted number the report publishes is the European total: “Taking inflation into account, real growth reached 4% for the total European B2C e-commerce turnover.”
The absolute values keep the ranking in proportion. Western Europe remains by far the largest region at 523.1 billion euros, roughly 57 percent of the European total. Northern Europe reached 69.5 billion and Central Europe 92.9 billion. So the fastest-growing regions are growing from much smaller bases, and 14 percent of a small number remains a small number.
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Why the regional ranking cannot be checked
Here is the part that should stop an expansion plan. A nominal growth rate bundles two things together: more shopping, and the same shopping costing more. The report separates them exactly once, for Europe as a whole, and never by region. So a 14 percent nominal figure and a 5 percent one are not comparable measurements of demand, and subtracting a single European average from both does not make them so.
The report does not publish the regional adjustment, so the honest statement is narrow: on nominal turnover, Eastern and Southern Europe grew fastest, and nobody reading the published figures can say which region grew fastest in real terms. Anyone presenting a regional ranking as real growth is presenting something the source does not contain.
That is the tension an operator has to hold. The money is in the west, the nominal momentum is in the east and the south, and the one comparison that would settle where to expand has not been published.
What 4 percent does to a plan
Nominal growth of 7 percent is the number that travelled this week. Real growth of 4 percent is the one that should have, and anyone building a 2027 plan should build it on the real figure and say so explicitly, because the nominal one is what everybody else will quote at them.
Four percent reframes what competitive performance looks like. In a market growing at that rate, a business growing 4 percent is standing still in share terms, and anything below it is losing ground while the revenue line still points up. That is the most common way a European e-commerce plan quietly fails: it hits its number, the market moves faster, and nobody notices for two years.
It follows that growth above the market has to come from somebody else. There is no longer enough category expansion to carry an ambitious plan on its own, which changes what the plan should be about. Taking share is a different discipline from riding growth, and it is resourced differently.
Tool comparison · FastMoss vs Kalodata
Regional growth rates tell you where a market is moving. They will not tell you whether your category is moving with it, and category divergence inside a growing market is usually wider than the regional spread. FastMoss and Kalodata both track category-level demand by market.
Comparison coming soon
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What the report expects next
The forecast is for a slowdown, to 5 percent nominal growth in 2026, with the report putting the 2026 market at 961 billion euros.
Those two figures sit slightly awkwardly together, since 5 percent on a 911 billion base arrives nearer 957 billion than 961. The gap is small and probably a rounding artefact in a report working across dozens of national datasets, but it is the kind of thing worth noticing before either number goes into a board pack as precise.
The direction is not in doubt either way. Growth is decelerating from an already modest real rate.
The label that has to travel
This is calendar-2025 data published in September 2026. It is a reading of last year, not a description of the market today, and a great deal has happened to European cross-border economics in the nine months since the period it covers.
That is a real limit on how it should be used. It is sound for setting a growth assumption. It is not evidence about current trading conditions, and anybody presenting it as the state of the market this autumn is stretching it.
Why the nominal figures run high in the east
Regional growth rates of this kind are usually doing three things at once, and separating them changes what an operator should conclude.
Part of it is catch-up. Eastern European markets started from lower online penetration, so a given amount of new shopping behaviour produces a larger percentage. Part is infrastructure: locker networks and local payment rails reached workable coverage in Central and Eastern Europe considerably later than in the west, and growth follows the rails. And part is simply price level, which is the component that does not survive an inflation adjustment and is the reason the published ranking cannot be read as a ranking of real demand.
The implication is that a 14 percent nominal growth rate is not by itself an invitation. Some of it is more shopping and some of it is the same shopping costing more, and the report does not tell you the split. It also describes markets where the winning proposition has so far been cheap and logistically simple, which is a different entry problem from the one a premium brand is usually equipped for.
Why the sector published it now
The report arrived attached to a policy argument, which is normal for trade-association research. The EuroCommerce director general’s framing is that “The 911 billion euro market shows that e-commerce is now integral to European retail and wholesale. Yet growth will translate into investment only if the Single Market works in practice.”
The ask underneath is enforcement of customs, product safety and environmental rules against sellers outside the EU, alongside the removal of internal barriers. European retailers have been making that case for two years and are now making it while the customs regime actually changes. Nothing in the data compels the conclusion, though the data is not weaker for coming with one attached.
Tool comparison · FastMoss vs Kalodata
If the growth is in the east and the south, the practical question is which products are actually selling there now rather than which region grew last year. Live product demand by market is the check on a year-old regional figure. FastMoss and Kalodata both provide it.
Comparison coming soon
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For the business operator
Change the growth assumption in your plan from 7 percent to 4 percent and see what breaks. If the plan still works, it was a good plan. If it does not, better to find that in September than in March.
Then look at where your expansion effort is pointed. If every country on the roadmap is in Western Europe, the roadmap is aimed at the region with the lowest nominal growth in Europe. That may still be correct, because that is where the money is, but it should be a decision rather than an inheritance from the last plan.
Southern Europe deserves more attention than it gets in this conversation. At 11 percent nominal off a substantial base, it is the combination of size and momentum that Eastern Europe does not yet offer.
Do not put a regional real-growth number in a business case. Subtracting the European average from each region produces a figure that looks rigorous and is invented.
From the consumer’s side
The difference between 7 percent nominal and 4 percent real is, in plain terms, the part of the increase that is prices rather than shopping. European consumers bought moderately more online last year and paid noticeably more for it.
That shows up as behaviour rather than as spend. Shoppers under price pressure compare more before buying, wait longer, use marketplaces where comparison is easy, and become markedly more sensitive to delivery charges that arrive late in a checkout. It explains a great deal about why platforms competing on price have taken share in exactly the regions where real incomes have been squeezed hardest, and why a seller’s growth can look flat while the category looks healthy.
The three-line version
If you run European trading or category planning, rebase your growth assumption on 4 percent real rather than 7 percent nominal, and label every regional rate in your own deck as nominal. The line to take upward is that the European market grew 4 percent in real money and is forecast to decelerate, so category growth will have to be taken from competitors rather than from the market.
If you have just taken on European strategy, the gap this exposes is that most plans use one European growth number, when the published nominal spread between regions is nearly three to one and the real spread is not published at all. A single figure for Europe is close to useless for deciding where to put effort, and the regional figures cannot be compared in the currency the plan is written in.
If you sign the budget, there is nothing to buy here and one thing to refuse. Decline any market-entry business case that leans on the 7 percent headline, and refuse any that presents a regional growth rate as real. Ask which of the two the number is, and if nobody in the room knows, the case is not ready.
Sources
EuroCommerce and Ecommerce Europe, European E-commerce Report 2026 — https://www.eurocommerce.eu/2026/09/european-e-commerce-reaches-e911-billion-as-sector-calls-for-fairer-competition/
RetailDetail EU — https://www.retaildetail.eu/news/general/e-commerce-is-growing-the-fastest-in-southern-and-eastern-europe/
Emerce — https://www.emerce.nl/nieuws/europees-ecommerce-groeit-tot-911-miljard-euro-7