According to e-commerce industry analysis presented at TCG Retail Summit 2026, 90–95% of all e-commerce growth globally is being captured by platforms — not brand-owned D2C. The Gini coefficient in e-commerce now sits at 90%, a concentration level not seen at any point in the last 15 years. Yet the brands achieving real, sustained growth in EMEA are not simply surrendering to Amazon or abandoning physical retail — they are building selective, supported retail positions across both physical and marketplace channels simultaneously. That combination, executed properly, is what the structural data actually supports.
The platform economy has, by most measures, won the e-commerce argument. What hasn't happened — what most brand strategy decks still haven't internalised — is what that victory actually means for a consumer electronics brand trying to build sustainable EMEA revenue.
Here is the direct answer: it does not mean hand your margins to Amazon and wait. It means something considerably more interesting — and considerably more demanding — than that.
The Numbers Most Brands Haven't Fully Internalised
Start with the data. E-commerce industry analysis shared at TCG Retail Summit 2026 in Copenhagen put a number on something most people in this industry sense but rarely quantify: 90–95% of all global e-commerce growth is currently landing on platforms — Amazon, TikTok Shop, Temu, Pinduoduo — not on brand-owned or retailer-owned D2C sites. Standalone independent e-commerce is, to use the bluntest summary of the analysis: "kind of dying" as a growth vehicle.
The Gini coefficient in e-commerce — a measure of concentration — now stands at 90%. That figure describes a level of wealth and growth concentration in fewer platforms than at any point in the last 15 years. The growth is not spreading. It is narrowing.
And yet: 75% of all retail revenue is still offline. Physical retail is not losing. E-commerce is growing within an overall market where the majority of transactions still happen in stores.
Those two facts together — e-commerce growth concentrating on platforms while physical retail still dominates total revenue — define the actual playing field. Most brands are reacting to one number while ignoring the other.
Why Amazon Is Not Your Partner — and Why That's Actually Useful to Know
Amazon's economics are worth understanding precisely because they clarify what Amazon is actually optimising for, and it is not your brand.
Amazon's international retail operation was loss-making in 18 of its last 20 years. Its real business is AWS, marketplace fees, and retail media. Amazon is currently shrinking its own-brand product range by approximately 50%, according to Amazon public data, and moving decisively toward a pure marketplace model. This is not brand partnership — it is landlord-tenant economics. You bring the product, the margin, and increasingly the marketing spend (via sponsored listings). Amazon takes the fee, the customer relationship, and the data.
That is not a reason to be absent from Amazon. In many EMEA categories, Amazon is simply the default discovery layer, and being absent is a worse outcome than paying the toll. But it is a reason to be clear-eyed: building on Amazon is building on rented land, and the rent is going up.
The useful thing about understanding this clearly is that it removes the anxiety from the decision. Amazon is a distribution channel with specific economics. Evaluate it as such. The brands that get into trouble are the ones that treat it as a growth strategy.
The Temu Problem Isn't Just Pricing — It's That They've Learned to Create Demand
Temu is a different kind of challenge, and it is worth separating it from the Amazon conversation.
Temu reached 115 million monthly European users, according to Temu market data. The platform takes a 5–10% cut regardless of product price. The margin model is, from the platform's perspective, close to pure arbitrage. TikTok Shop reported $65bn GMV outside China; in Germany alone, TikTok Shop saw 43% weekly buyer growth through 2025, with 14,000+ active sellers now active, per TikTok market data.
What makes this more than a pricing problem is demand creation. Temu and TikTok Shop are not simply capturing consumers who already know what they want. They are generating product discovery. They create a purchase occasion that would not otherwise have existed. That is a capability that Amazon built over two decades. Temu and TikTok have accelerated it through social mechanics and algorithmic surfacing.
The consumer behaviour data makes this uncomfortable: a survey from TCG found that 75% of respondents said locally made products were important to them. The same respondents were shopping more on Temu. Stated values and actual behaviour diverge significantly on price. That is not a cynical observation — it is a structural reality that any honest EMEA retail strategy has to account for.
Temu is now running a Local Seller Program, actively recruiting European sellers for local fulfilment. The platform is building infrastructure in Europe, not retreating. Consumer electronics brands that dismiss this as a low-end-only problem should look again at the category breadth already visible on the platform.
The Brands Winning EMEA Are Doing Neither — They're Doing Both
Here is what I consistently observe across the brands that have achieved breakout growth in EMEA: they are not making a binary choice between platform-first and physical retail. They are building a position in both, deliberately, with each channel doing a specific job.
Physical retail creates demand. Marketplaces fulfil it. That is the architecture that works.
When we launched Shokz across EMEA — a bone-conduction audio brand with high product awareness barriers and a price point that requires genuine consumer understanding — the strategy was not Amazon-first. It was selective physical placement in the right specialist and consumer electronics retailers, supported with proper training and in-store presence, combined with marketplace management for fulfilment and long-tail discovery. The result was 200% year-on-year growth. That number comes from building physical presence correctly, not from surrendering the brand to a feed algorithm.
SumUp's EMEA retail expansion followed the same logic. Reaching 1,500 stores in year one with 3x sales growth was not an accident of distribution. It was the result of knowing which physical retail partners created genuine demand, supporting them properly, and using marketplaces to handle the volume that physical retail generates.
Alexander Rauchut, representing MediaMarktSaturn's strategic direction at TCG 2026, was direct about what is working in Germany's largest consumer electronics retail environment: brands that use physical retail as a demand-creation vehicle are winning. The differentiation is through service spaces and brand experience zones. The brands that show up with a planogram and no support do not generate the same outcome.
The question MediaMarktSaturn is now asking brands — and it is the right question — is: what is your service around the product that does not depend on product cost versus retail price? That is the new margin model. Products alone are commoditised at both ends: platforms on price, manufacturers competing on spec. The sustainable position is the service layer that sits around the product, and that service layer is much easier to build through physical retail than through a marketplace listing.
What This Means in Practice
Four things worth acting on directly:
▸Stop treating platform presence and physical retail as competing budget lines. They are not alternatives. Brands that allocate budget to one at the expense of the other are misreading the structural data. The winning model funds both, with each channel doing a defined job.
▸Evaluate Amazon as a distribution channel with specific economics — not as a growth partner. Calculate your actual margin after fees, sponsored listings, and returns handling. Then decide what volume makes sense. Do not let Amazon's category dominance push you into economics that don't work.
▸TikTok Shop's 43% weekly buyer growth in Germany in 2025 is not a B2C curiosity. If your product category is discoverable through short-form video, you need a TikTok Shop strategy now, not as a future consideration. The demand-creation mechanics are real, the scale is real, and the window for early positioning will not stay open.
▸Ask the MediaMarktSaturn question about your own product. What is the service layer around your product that does not depend on cost price versus retail price? If you cannot answer that clearly, you are competing on the wrong dimension in physical retail — and physical retail will keep losing that argument to platforms every time.
The regulatory environment is shifting in ways that change the platform calculus — our post on the July 2026 customs reform covers what changes on 1 July and what it means for brands competing against non-compliant platform pricing.
If you are deciding between EMEA retail build-out and platform-first — or trying to make both work simultaneously — we have helped brands navigate exactly this. See how our Strategic Retail Management service works, or read how we approached EMEA expansion with Shokz.