26 November 2025
E-commerce and inflation are two structural forces increasingly interconnected that shape how prices are set and people shop. While EU inflation has eased after peaking at 8.3% in 2022, it is expected to remain elevated in the coming years, putting pressure on consumers. At the same time, e-commerce continues to expand, reaching €958 billion in B2C revenues in 2024 (+50.4% vs 2019), redefining behaviours across consumers and firms. Understanding how these two dynamics interact is essential to design policies that protect households and support the economy.
TEHA Group had already explored this link in the study from 2023 “E-commerce: Perceptions and Evidence of Benefits for Citizens, Business, and the Italian Economy”, which showed that in Italy, online prices were more stable than overall price levels and that without the diffusion of e-commerce, inflation would have been higher. This result was later confirmed outside of Italy when other countries such as France, Ireland, and Australia, leveraging TEHA’s methodology, reached the same conclusion.
In 2025, a new Study carried out by TEHA Group in collaboration with Amazon - titled "The disinflationary effect of e-commerce. An analysis for Europe" - has broadened the analysis to the European level and investigated the relationship between e-commerce, prices and inflation in the EU, which is key to understanding how digital markets influence inflation across diverse economies, guiding coherent and fair regulation of the retail sector to protect consumers and ensure growth.
What we have learned, using an econometric methodology applied to data from 27 EU countries:
- e-commerce helps contain inflation without harming GDP growth and online prices are more stable than offline prices
- the expansion of e-commerce in the European Union leads to lower inflation: a 1 p.p. increase in the share of online shoppers lowers inflation by up to 0.073 p.p. in the EU, with a direct economic benefit for citizens: over 5 years, each EU households have saved approximately €4,500 (€880 annually)
- from 2020 to 2025, the EU average online prices were 6.9 p.p. lower than the offline prices, with online prices that acted as an anchor damping overall inflation: for every 1 p.p. increase in online prices, inflation growth slows by 0.018 p.p.
Download the documents
Paper - "The disinflationary effect of e-commerce. An analysis for Europe"