Ecommerce in Switzerland — Statistics and Trends 2026, with Sources

Statistics about ecommerce in Switzerland circulate without a year, a methodology or a base — and a number missing all three tells you very little. Every figure below carries its source, its year and the group it was calculated on, and where something isn't published for Switzerland we say so rather than filling the gap with an EU number relabelled as Swiss. That happens more often than you might expect: Switzerland isn't in the EU, so it is missing from most of Eurostat's enterprise surveys. The data comes from three places: the annual market survey by Handelsverband.swiss with NIQ/GfK and Swiss Post, Eurostat's household tables, where the Swiss row is supplied by the Federal Statistical Office (FSO), and the Baymard Institute's checkout research, which is global rather than Swiss. For what counts as e-commerce in the first place, see what is e-commerce.

The size of the Swiss ecommerce market

Handelsverband.swiss, the Swiss retail association, publishes an annual estimate of the online market together with NIQ/GfK and Swiss Post. For 2025 (release of 12 March 2026), Swiss consumers ordered goods online worth CHF 15.8 billion, against CHF 14.9 billion a year earlier — growth of 6%, or CHF 0.9 billion. Of that, CHF 13 billion went directly to retailers in Switzerland (purchases in CHF including VAT), up 6%, and CHF 2.8 billion to retailers abroad, up 8% after an 18% jump in 2024. Small parcels from Asia still make up the bulk of foreign shipments, at around 20 million parcels a year.

This is an industry association's market survey, not official statistics — so quote it with its name and edition year, and don't compare it with a figure from a different methodology. It covers goods ordered by private individuals, not services and not B2B sales.

The same survey groups retailers by their main assortment. Home electronics retailers hold the largest share of Swiss online sales at 28%, followed by fashion at 16% and home & living at 15% — together close to 60% of the market. Food, at 10%, completes the top four; the remaining groups (general merchandise, sport, books and media, DIY, health and beauty) are each below 10%. Home electronics also grew fastest in 2025, at 11%, while fashion grew for the first time in five years, by 2.5%.

How many people in Switzerland shop online

Eurostat's isoc_ec_ib20 dataset (updated 17 April 2026) carries a Swiss row supplied by the FSO: 85.5% of people aged 16–74 in Switzerland bought something online in the 12 months before the 2025 survey, up from 83.42% in 2023 (the table has no Swiss figure for 2024). Among internet users the figure is 86.26%, and 73.86% of all 16–74-year-olds had bought online within the last three months. The EU27 average for 2025 is 73.56% — a genuinely different market, not a rounding difference, and a good reason not to read "European" statistics as Swiss ones.

The gap is widest among older buyers. In 2025, 63.73% of Swiss 65–74-year-olds bought online, against 44.38% in the EU27; among 16–24-year-olds the figure was 91.51%. In Switzerland, then, an online shop can't treat older customers as a niche.

How many Swiss businesses sell online

This is the figure this article can't give you. Eurostat's enterprise e-commerce tables, isoc_ec_eseln2 and isoc_ec_evaln2, contain no Swiss row (we checked the country list on 2 October 2026), and we found no comparable FSO publication. So there is no confirmed, economy-wide share of Swiss enterprises that sell online, nor a share of their turnover from web sales. Rather than estimate one or borrow the EU figure, we leave the gap visible.

Marketplaces versus own online shops

Handelsverband's survey describes marketplaces as dominant. Digitec Galaxus was again the biggest winner in 2025, and Galaxus, Zalando and Ricardo all extended their lead. According to the Carpathia analysis quoted in the same release, 13 of the top 30 B2C online shops in Switzerland are marketplaces. That is a count of shops in a ranking, not a share of sales value, so don't read it as "marketplaces take 43% of the market".

For sellers, marketplace costs are public only in part. Ricardo charges no listing fee (except a refundable one for vehicles priced at CHF 3,000 or more) and a success fee of 8–12% of the sale price depending on the product type, capped at CHF 290 (Ricardo help centre, updated 2 October 2026). Digitec Galaxus doesn't publish its commission for marketplace sellers; we found no public figure and don't guess one.

Ecommerce trends in Switzerland for 2026

Swiss sources don't publish a breakdown of how shoppers find products or finish their purchases — which device, which delivery method, whether they bought directly on a social platform or used an AI summary — the way some national consumer panels elsewhere do. Neither do the Eurostat tables used here. So there is no Swiss figure for these questions, and we don't import one from another country.

What Handelsverband does publish is its authors' outlook for 2026 — expectations, not measurements. They expect online consumption to grow by about 5% in 2026 on the back of better consumer sentiment, with January 2026 already pointing up. They expect Swiss marketplaces and portals to strengthen their position further while competition from foreign platforms remains. They see "AI-driven commerce" through AI agents gaining relevance in product search and purchasing over the next few years, and social commerce becoming more important, especially for Generation Z. Quote these as the study authors' forecast, with the date of the release, not as facts about 2026.

Trust: what goes wrong when Swiss shoppers buy online

Eurostat's isoc_ec_iprb21 table, which asks people who bought online in the previous three months what went wrong, has a Swiss row for 2025 — and it is worth reading next to the EU27 figure. 10.65% of Swiss online buyers reported at least one problem, against 35.43% in the EU27. For the most common complaint, delivery slower than indicated, Switzerland is at 5.66% against 19.92%; for a website that was difficult to use or didn't work properly, 4.24% against 11.49%; for wrong or damaged goods, 3.86% against 10.36%; for a final cost higher than indicated, 3.09% against 4.5%. Swiss buyers report fewer problems on every specific problem the table names; only the catch-all "other" category is slightly higher in Switzerland (4.44% against 3.48%).

These are problems people say they actually ran into, not fears. A low national rate is also a high bar: if Swiss customers rarely experience late deliveries, a shop that misses its delivery promise stands out more, not less.

Cart abandonment — a number that's easy to misread

The Baymard Institute publishes a figure that puts the average cart-abandonment rate at 70.22% — "an average calculated based on 50 different studies containing statistics on ecommerce shopping cart abandonment" (baymard.com/lists/cart-abandonment-rate, "Last updated: September 22, 2025"). That is an average of studies by different companies, from different years and with different methods, not a single Baymard measurement — and not a Swiss one; we found no comparable Swiss figure. Another page from the same institute gives a different number for a similar but not identical measurement: "70.19%", "tracked … for 14 years" (baymard.com/research/checkout-usability). Quote one of the two pages with its own number — don't average them.

The figure doesn't mean that seven in ten carts are lost sales. Many abandonments are part of how people shop: looking around, comparing prices, saving a product for later. On the same page Baymard reports that 42% of US online shoppers have abandoned a cart because they were "just browsing / not ready to buy" — a US survey, not a Swiss one. We break down the remaining reasons, with a source for each, in cart abandonment, and don't repeat that table here.

What these statistics won't tell you about your store

Every number above is an average, an estimate or a declared answer from a sample your store almost certainly wasn't part of. The national market value, the marketplaces' place in a top-30 ranking or the share of people buying online won't tell you whether your checkout works, whether your customers prefer Digitec Galaxus to your own shop or what your real return rate is. Industry data is good for one thing: checking whether your own figure sits in the normal range or clearly stands out. What to fix comes from your own analytics — abandonment by device, the checkout step where most people leave, and the share of orders from returning customers.

Switzerland has a published market value (CHF 15.8 billion) but no figure for the share of businesses that sell online — the opposite of the EU, where Eurostat counts sellers but nobody publishes a comparable euro total. If you are working out the full cost of running a shop, use figures for your own project rather than an averaged market. Our online store cost report shows what a line-by-line, sourced cost breakdown looks like — its rates come from the Polish market, not Switzerland, so use it as an example of method — and the e-commerce TCO calculator estimates the cost of running your store over several years, not just the build.