Luxembourgers continued online shopping spree last year

Across the European Union, 77% of internet users ordered goods and services online for private consumption in 2024, which puts Luxembourg slightly ahead of the average, at around 81%.

Almost all (96%) of Irish internet users purchased online in 2024 – the continent’s most prolific internet shoppers – while Luxembourg was in ninth position, sandwiched between Germany and Finland.

Luxembourg stands out in the statistics for its tiny growth rate of around three percentage points compared to a decade earlier, in 2014, when around 78% of residents shopped online – which at the time put it in the bloc’s top four. For comparison, Ireland, the 2024 online shopping leader, jumped nearly 32 percentage points within a decade. The EU average in 2014, meanwhile, was below 60%.

© Photo credit: Eurostat

The data shows that Luxembourg was an early adopter of online commerce and that the sector is still growing, with the country remaining slightly above the EU average.

At the opposite end of the scale, residents of Bulgaria (57%), Italy (60%) and Romania (60%) are the EU’s least likely to buy online, according to data released on Thursday by European statistics bureau, Eurostat.

The EU’s biggest online market by some margin is for clothing, shoes and accessories, with 45% of the bloc’s internet users having bought items online in the past three months.

Fast-food and takeaways came second, attracting purchases by 21% of Europeans. One in five (20%) bought cosmetics and wellness products online, and 19% furniture and home & garden accessories.