UNCTAD’s B2C E-commerce index for 2018 confirms The Netherlands as the most prepared country in the world for e-commerce with Singapore and Switzerland in second and third. The United Kingdom ranked fourth on the index, but placed as the highest B2C spending per shopper in Europe and the world’s highest proportion of B2C revenues to GDP.

This year, The Netherlands beat Luxembourg  – previously ranking among some of the highest but due to its poor postal reliability score dropped out of the top ten list. Postal reliability is one of the key factors taken into consideration for ranking and overall score.

“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.”

This year’s index provided information related to improving measurement efforts:

“The 2018 UNCTAD B2C E-commerce Index, which measures an economy’s preparedness to support online shopping, has expanded its coverage to include 151 economies, up seven from the 2017 edition. The index consists of four indicators that are highly related to online shopping and for which there is wide country coverage (box 1).

“The release of new account ownership data from the World Bank’s 2017 Global Findex survey has increased the number of countries included and allows for an estimation of account data for the intervening years since the last survey in 2014,” (UNCTAD).

Source: UNCTAD