A market accelerating on transaction volume
Revenue growth is real (+7%), but the strongest signal is elsewhere: transactions topped 3.2 billion in 2025, up 11%. French shoppers are buying online more often, even as average order value keeps falling (62 euros, down 3% from 2024). Half of all transactions are under 30 euros.
The pattern is clear. Buyers are shopping around. They compare, they hunt for the best price, and they check out more often, just on smaller baskets. For sellers, that means one thing: price competitiveness isn’t an edge anymore. It’s table stakes.
Product sales are picking back up (+4%), after two years of inflation pressure. Services grew 9%. E-commerce now accounts for 12% of total retail in France.
Marketplaces keep taking share
32% of online product sales now go through marketplaces. That number climbs every year, no exceptions.
The top five e-commerce sites by customer count prove it. Amazon leads with 24 million active customers and 57.5% penetration among French online shoppers. Vinted comes in second, ahead of E.Leclerc, Fnac, and Cdiscount.
The categories driving the most marketplace volume: electronics (25%), fashion (17%), home appliances and decor (17%). These are categories where competition is fierce, price comparison is instant, and speed is everything.
France counts 158,200 active online stores. But FEVAD points to a structural reality: 1% of sellers generate 78% of the sector’s revenue. The market is open to everyone, but it’s dominated by whoever has the right tools.
No room left for guesswork on price
75 purchases per buyer per year, 4,657 euros spent on average. French consumers are seasoned online shoppers, buying regularly, and getting more demanding.
In this environment, you can’t set your price once a week and walk away. A stale price on Amazon or Cdiscount means lost margin if you’re too high, or a lost sale the moment a competitor undercuts you. The math backs it up: transactions are up 11%, average baskets are down 3%. Volume makes up for smaller order values, but only if you stay in the game.
Stock synchronization is the other pressure point. With 42.2 million active online shoppers and 3.2 billion transactions, any gap between real stock and what’s listed online turns straight into a cancellation, a penalty, and a damaged seller score.
AI is taking hold, on both sides of the transaction
The headline of the 2026 FEVAD report is AI. Two numbers sum it up.
On the seller side, 94% of e-commerce merchants say they adopted generative AI tools in 2025. Agentic commerce is the innovation leaders are most excited about for the next three years, cited by 69% of executives surveyed.
On the buyer side, nearly 1 in 3 online shoppers already use AI somewhere in their purchase journey, mostly to compare products and find the best deal. Among frequent AI users, that jumps to 3 in 4.
In practice, this means your buyers are showing up better informed, with comparisons already done. That adds even more pressure on price, availability, and product data quality.
Second hand is here to stay
41.4% of online shoppers bought at least one secondhand product in the last 12 months. Resale now makes up 17% of online fashion purchases, and it’s growing across every category: media, games and toys, tech equipment.
What stands out in the FEVAD numbers is the mix. In most categories, buyers combine new and secondhand in the same shopping journey. It’s not a niche anymore. It’s a standard layer of how people shop.
What this means for marketplace sellers
The 2026 FEVAD report paints a market that’s growing, increasingly shaped by marketplaces, under constant price pressure, and more automated by the day.
For sellers managing several channels at once, every number points to the same challenge: how do you stay competitive on price, reliable on stock, and fast on order processing, without letting the complexity outgrow what your team can handle?
That’s exactly what Sellermania has addressed for 20 years. As a marketplace feed manager, we bring product listings, stock synchronization, order processing, and dynamic repricing into a single interface.
The right price, the right stock, across every marketplace, in real time.
✔️ Over 500 million euros in sales are processed through Sellermania every year.
✔️ 87% of our clients grow their revenue after switching on repricing.
✔️ Stock updates in under 5 minutes, compared to 4 to 6 hours on average for most feed managers.
In a market that’s speeding up, that’s the difference between reacting to competition and staying ahead of it.