The major retail and e-commerce trends of 2025

In 2024, the retail sector has undergone a major cycle of concentration and a quest for greater efficiency. On the consumer side, trade-offs were less marked than in 2023, but are continuing. Although supermarket prices have been falling since June, they remain high on a face value basis. Over a rolling 3-year period to the end of June 2024, prices were up 22% in France, 30% in Germany, 26.5% in the Eurozone and 19% in the U.S.A.

In 2024, financing strategies were heavily influenced by the rise in interest rates and the constraints associated with the debt accumulated during Covid-19. For those who had borrowed at low cost, this is the ‘debt wall’. The issue is particularly acute in the retail sector, where margins are low. The challenge is to generate EBITDA to finance transformation plans (and price cuts) and repay residual debt. According to Jean-Pascal Mathieu, Senior Director at Sapiens, “the AI steamroller is pushing them to speed up the modernisation of tech and IT thanks to case studies that grow industries”.

2024 highlights by sector

-In food: In Europe, the leaders are doing well (Tesco, E.Leclerc), “but the players at the back of the pack are suffering and some are going to disappear”, according to Daniel Ducrocq, Vice President Western Europe Retailer Services at NielsenIQ. Concerns about profitability are high, and supplier concentration is almost inevitable in a number of countries’. We saw this in France in 2024, with takeovers (Cora and Casino), in Belgium (Mestdagh) and in Sweden (City Gross).

In France, after a 1% fall in volumes in 2023, the downturn seems to have stopped. Over the period January-October 2024, total supermarket volumes are up by 0.2%. Omnichannel e-commerce (drive, excluding pure-players) is the big winner of the year, and convenience stores are holding up well. However, hypermarkets and supermarkets are losing volume.

Non-food in difficulty: This is the case for fashion, where second-hand goods accounted for 19% of online fashion sales in 2024 (Fox). Today, other sectors are under threat, such as household goods, due to the fall in property transactions (down 17% in France over the 12 months to the end of September). In 2024,…