Fastest-Growing Online Category in Germany
Review Jan–Oct 2025 vs. Jan–Oct 2026: Health care (pharmacy) items grew their share of German online baskets by +15.3% year-on-year, while electronics shed −11.2% — the widest divergence among the top 8 online verticals. Jan–Oct 2025 vs. 2026
License: CC BY 4.0 · Source: General Evidence · How to reuse
Info
- Sample size
- n = 7,539
- Data date
- Jan–Oct 2025 vs. Jan–Oct 2026
- Segment
- All segments
- Platform
- Purchases
- Market
- Germany
Analysis
Pharmacy is now the single fastest-growing online vertical in Germany — its share of purchased items rose +15.3% year-on-year (confidence range: +6.8% to +23.6%), a gain that is both statistically clear and commercially significant. Among the top 8 online verticals by purchase volume, no other category comes close: food & beverages grew a modest +6.3%, home & garden +1.7%, while fashion was essentially flat at −2.0%.
The e-prescription and medical cannabis effect
The pharmacy surge is structural, not seasonal. Germany's e-prescription rollout — which became mandatory for all statutory insurers in 2024 — made online pharmacies into routine infrastructure rather than a convenience option. Online pharmacy revenue grew nearly 10% in Q1 2026 alone, the strongest increase since e-prescriptions were introduced, according to bevh data. Within pharmacy, medical cannabis is driving an outsized share of new buyers: the share of online health-care shoppers who purchased medical cannabis rose from 4.7% to 7.3% between Jan–Oct 2025 and Jan–Oct 2026 — see Medical cannabis buyers in Germany for the full breakdown. Germany's medical cannabis market, valued at roughly €1 billion in 2025, more than doubled in a year as the April 2024 Cannabis Act removed cannabis from narcotics classification and opened telemedicine-based prescribing at scale.
Electronics' decline — the steepest in the ranking at −11.2% — mirrors industry data: the German electronics market contracted 2.5% in revenue in H1 2026, with consumer electronics down 3.2%. Spending is shifting from big-ticket, infrequent purchases toward replenishment categories like health, food, and drugstore. Drugstore items (personal care) were flat at −3.2%, consistent with bevh reporting drugstore growth in revenue terms — a discrepancy explained by falling unit prices rather than falling demand.
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Methodology
The analysis tracks a fixed group of German online shoppers who made at least one physical-goods purchase in both Jan–Oct 2025 and Jan–Oct 2026. Purchase records come from email order confirmations, Amazon order exports, and browsing-inferred checkouts; in-store receipts, digital goods, and restaurant orders are excluded. Each purchase is assigned to one of the top 8 online verticals by 2025 purchase volume, using a standardised retail taxonomy (health care covers pharmacy and OTC products; personal care covers drugstore). The metric is each vertical's share of total purchased line items in each window — not raw counts — because share change isolates relative growth independently of overall order-volume shifts. Year-on-year change is the 2026 share divided by the 2025 share, minus one. Estimates are weighted to reflect the German online-shopping population by age, gender, region, education, and income. The confidence range is derived from 300-draw user-level resampling.
These insights are based on the General Evidence Panel. Our data comes exclusively from users who are compensated for sharing their data. Become part of the panel & earn from your data