E-commerce grew in the first half of 2024
In the first half of 2024, Finnish payment service providers’ customers made more e-commerce payments with cards and credit transfers than in the same period last year. The online purchases were focused on Finland and the euro area.
In the first half of 2024, Finnish payment service providers’ customers made more e-commerce payments with cards and credit transfers than in the same period last year. The payments amounted to 234 million transactions, with an aggregate value of EUR 11.8 billion. Year on year, the number of e-commerce payments increased by 14% (29 million payments) and their value in euro terms increased by 12% (EUR 1.3 billion).
In terms of the number of e-commerce transactions, 78% of the payments were made using cards and 22% using credit transfer in the first half of 2024. However, credit transfers on average were larger than card payments, and they amounted to 40% of the total euro amount of payments. The average value of a credit transfer in e-commerce was EUR 91, in contrast with the average value of EUR 39 for card payments in the first half of 2024.
October 2023 saw the entry into force of amendments of the Consumer Protection Act requiring e-merchants to rearrange payment methods so that those allowing the use of a credit card or the application for new credit to complete the payment are presented lower. In the first half of 2024, credit cards were used approximately 47 million times to pay e-commerce purchases, which was about the same as in the previous year-half. However, in contrast with the first half of 2023, the number of credit card payments grew by 13%. The number of online payments with other types of cards has grown continuously throughout the period covered by the semi-annual statistics, starting from 2022. Debit cards are the most popular cards in e-commerce: they were used in 132 million transactions amounting to EUR 4.1 billion in the first half of 2024.
The majority of credit transfers in e-commerce are initiated with an e-payment button. In the first half of 2024, 39 million payments were made with an e-payment button, amounting to a total of EUR 3.0 billion. The number of payments initiated with an e-payment button has decreased slightly from the corresponding period of 2022 and 2023, when the number of such payments amounted to almost 40 million. However, a greater drop took place in the value of these payments, since the value of payments initiated with an e-payment button was still EUR 4.8 billion in the first half of 2022. The most common method of online payment is to enter the details of the payment card directly at the e-merchant’s store checkout. A total of 152 million payments related to e-commerce were initiated using a card in the first half of 2024.
The online purchases of Finnish PSPs’ customers were focused on Finland and the euro area. A total of 162 million payments amounting to EUR 9.0 billion were made to Finland and 50 million payments worth EUR 2.0 billion to the rest of the euro area. Purchases from non-euro area EU countries amounted to EUR 0.4 billion and purchases from outside the EU to 0.5 billion in the first half of 2024. In the first half of 2024, euro area e-commerce saw the fastest growth: 26% in terms of the number of transactions year on year. In the same period, payments to non-EU e-merchants grew almost similarly in terms of the number of transactions (22%), but only 4% in terms of value.
The figures discussed in this news release have been published in the payment statistics dashboard.
The next semi-annual news release on payment statistics will be published at 10 a.m. on 6 June 2025.