Most popular cross-border shopping categories in France 2018

As online shopping highly depends on what people choose to buy, high-tech and electronic products have a higher tendency to be bought online. However, for products such as food, hygiene or cleaning products, people prefer to buy them in-store. As every country has a specialty in a specific product category, globalization and cross-border commerce has made it possible for the consumer to either directly buy at the source of production or through marketplaces shipping national brands internationally. Thus, the product category for which French consumers shopped the most from another country were clothes, footwear and accessories in 2018.

Cross-border shopping behavior of the French

With less than 25 percent of goods sold internationally from French companies, France sells the most to its neighbors, especially Belgium, Spain and Italy.
Looking at the profile of online cross-border shoppers, the proportion of French e-buyers who purchased from foreign sellers in 2019 amounted to half of the population, and 27 percent of internet buyers ordered products or services from sellers located in countries within the European Union. For 22 percent of French shoppers, products were bought outside of the EU, mostly from China, the US and the UK in 2018.

Drivers and constraints of cross-border commerce

With France ranking in tenth place in terms of globalization, there has been a rise in popularity of Made in France products for ecological reasons, as well as to support the French economy during the COVID-19 crisis. This popularity was reflected in the behavior of about 60 percent of French people, who preferred to shop only domestically .