Temu is crushing domestic webshops – Christmas won’t change either

While Hungarian online retail still maintains its leading role in terms of number, a clear takeover is already taking place in the background: foreign webshops – primarily Temu – are taking an increasingly larger share of Hungarians’ online spending. According to Péter Gergely, financial expert at BiztosDöntés.hu, based on the latest data, the only question now is how quickly these – primarily global – players will push domestic webshops into the background.

In the third quarter of 2025, there were even more purchases in Hungarian webshops, albeit with a hair’s breadth of difference: 53.24 million transactions were made with Hungarian bank cards at domestic online acceptance points, compared to 50.47 million purchases in foreign webshops. Accordingly, the share of domestic online stores in terms of number is still 51.3 percent, but this ratio represents a dramatic decline in historical comparison – warns the expert from BiztosDöntés.hu.

Five years ago, in the fall of 2020 – during the time of online commerce boosted by the coronavirus pandemic – domestic webshops were able to show a share of 57.5 percent, and in fact, as a result of new webshop openings, domestic retail was able to strengthen to 62.3 percent in terms of online spending by the third quarter of 2022 – reminds Péter Gergely. In comparison, the loss of position of more than 11 percentage points can be considered dramatic, according to the expert.

More telling than the number of units is the shift in value. Already in the second quarter of 2025, the amount spent in foreign webshops exceeded domestic online turnover, but the gap widened further in the third quarter. Hungarian consumers spent 1,192 billion forints in foreign online stores, while the turnover of domestic webshops slipped back below 1,000 billion forints and remained below 970 billion forints. As a result, only 44.9 percent of Hungarian online shopping spending paid for with bank cards remains domestic.

This is in particularly sharp contrast to previous years. According to the same methodology, the share of domestic online shopping in the value of online spending was 61 percent in 2020, and 63.7 percent at the end of 2022. In just a few years, the trend has practically reversed: today, the majority of Hungarian online spending flows abroad, says Péter Gergely.

Based on the growth rates, it is clear what is driving the change. While the number of domestic webshop purchases grew at a rate of less than 3 percent on an annual basis and the value of domestic online spending increased by “only” 10.7 percent, we paid nearly 28 percent more at foreign webshops, while the amount spent jumped by two-thirds, more than 66 percent. This dynamic can clearly be linked to the explosive growth of Temu and Shein, according to the BiztosDöntés.hu expert. Of course, Péter Gergely adds, we should not forget that companies that have been present on the Hungarian market for a long time with physical stores and are mainly interested in online commerce, such as Alza, EMAG, VidaXL, ecipo.hu, or even kifli.hu, are actually foreign traders – the forints spent with their bank cards are also considered foreign purchases.