The French continued, at the start of the year, to buy massively online.
The sales of products on the internet grew by 30% in the first quarter of 2021, according to the barometer of the federation of the sector, Fevad.
This is growth as sustained as that observed in 2020, during which the penetration of e-commerce in France has gained several years.
14% of product purchases are now made with a few clicks, compared to 9% before the pandemic.
Read also:
Distributors on all fronts to deploy food e-commerce ... and make it profitable
The closure of non-essential stores, from February for some of them, has contributed to this new surge in e-commerce.
In the first week of April, when all non-essential businesses closed, online sales jumped 45%.
But even food stores, which were not closed, saw the share of their online sales continue to climb (+ 13%).
Since the start of the pandemic, traditional brands, with physical stores, have been the ones with the strongest online sales growth.
They have climbed 66% over one year, twice the market average, and three times more than players who only sell online, like Amazon.
This quarter, however, their growth appears to be weakening slightly.
Read also:
Praised and contested, Amazon ends a record year
Will e-commerce remain at such high levels for the long term?
"
We think so
," explained François Momboisse, president of Fevad.
Foreign examples show that there are ratchets, especially in food
. ”
Customers have adopted new habits and brands have made heavy investments to meet this surge in demand on the internet.
In food, the growth of online shopping should however resume in the coming months its usual growth rate, of around 0.2 or 0.3 point of market share per year, according to Nielsen.