Online Shopping? Mauritius leads Africa
*Netherlands First In The World
The Netherlands has placed top of UNCTAD’s Business-to-Consumer (B2C) E-commerce Index for 2018 as the most prepared country in the world for global online shopping.
Mauritius leads Africa, ranked 55th.
The new index, released today in Nairobi, Kenya shows that eight of the top ten countries for online shopping are in Europe, with index values extremely close and a range of just four points between first and tenth rank.
The highest-scoring African country on the new B2C E-commerce Index is Mauritius, with a global ranking of 55.
The Netherlands, which ranked third in 2017, ousted Luxembourg, which dropped out of the top ten as a result of a sharp fall in its postal reliability score. Zenith Bank launches POS payments without cards “The Netherlands has high values for most indicators, particularly in secure servers – a proxy for e-commerce shops – where it is top-ranked among all 151 countries included in the index,” Shamika N. Sirimanne, director of UNCTAD’s division on technology and logistics, said.
“The country also has the second highest proportion of online shoppers in the world – 76% of the population aged 15 and older.” Singapore and Switzerland are in second and third place.
Singapore has surged 16 positions since 2017, with increased values across all indicators.
It now ranks among the top countries in accounts, secure-server penetration and postal reliability. Switzerland also rates favourably on all indicators.
The United Kingdom climbed to fourth position, boasting the highest B2C spending per shopper in Europe and the world’s highest proportion of B2C revenues to GDP.
Norway and Sweden, fifth and eighth respectively, have among the world’s highest values for all indicators, except secure-server penetration.
Iceland, ranked sixth, has near ubiquitous Internet access with 98% of the population online, the highest in the world (with Bahrain and Norway).
Its score is brought down by a relatively low level of postal reliability, possibly a reflection of challenging terrain and weather conditions in the nation. One alternative is drone delivery, which has already been launched by Iceland’s biggest B2C e-commerce company.
New Zealand ranked ninth and Denmark completes the top ten.
