The Maze: Amazon looks like Europe's retail king. The 2025 GMV ranking puts it at EUR 179.7B, up 12% YoY. Then the useful part arrives: Schwarz Group is right behind at EUR 179.4B. The gap between a global marketplace machine and Lidl-plus-Kaufland is EUR 0.3B. That is not a moat. It is a measurement error with better PR.
The leaderboard is less digital than the headline suggests. Amazon ranks first in the source ranking, but the next seven names are mostly grocery-led incumbents: Schwarz, Aldi, REWE, Edeka, Carrefour, E.Leclerc, and Tesco. That matters because food retail is still a frequency engine. Customers buy it every week. Store networks create default habits. Private label gives margin control. Delivery and click-and-collect give digital reach without abandoning the store base. Europe's biggest retail battlefield is not online versus offline. It is ecosystem versus ecosystem.
Schwarz is the real surprise, not Amazon. The ranking gives Amazon EUR 179.7B GMV and Schwarz EUR 179.4B. Amazon grows faster, at 12% versus Schwarz at 7%, but the absolute scale is almost identical. That puts Lidl and Kaufland in a different strategic category from normal "traditional retail" commentary. They are not legacy stores waiting to be disrupted. They are scaled demand aggregators with price power, food traffic, hard-discount muscle, and increasingly digital extensions. Amazon has the cleaner platform story. Schwarz has the household wallet.
The middle of the table shows how much Europe still runs through stores. Aldi at EUR 93.5B and REWE at EUR 90.2B form a second tier that is roughly half Amazon's size but still enormous. Edeka, Carrefour, E.Leclerc, Tesco, and Intermarche add another dense block of grocery-heavy demand. That crowding creates a harder market for brands than a single-platform narrative implies. A seller can win on Amazon and still miss huge baskets if it ignores grocery, mass retail, and national champions. Europe is fragmented by country, format, and shopping mission.
Growth is where Amazon still changes the temperature. Amazon's 12% YoY is the fastest visible growth rate in the ranking. Ahold Delhaize grows 11%, Apple grows 10%, Mercadona 8%, and Schwarz 7%. Most other large grocery names sit in the low single digits. That is the strategic tension. Store-led players have scale and customer frequency. Amazon has a compounding flywheel across marketplace supply, fulfillment, ads, Prime, and seller tools. If those layers keep adding services around the same customer relationship, the growth gap can matter more than the tiny GMV gap.
The ranking mixes models, so the comparison needs care. GMV is not revenue, profit, online sales, or retail media income. A marketplace euro does not equal a grocery euro. A restaurant chain and a furniture retailer do not run the same economics. But that is exactly why the ranking is useful. It shows where consumer spend aggregates before margin, channel, and operating model carve it up. The strategic question is not who has the prettiest digital story. It is who controls repeated demand and can attach higher-margin services to it.
Why it matters: Europe is not an Amazon-only board. Amazon has the fastest visible growth and the best platform narrative. But grocery groups still sit on massive, frequent, local demand. The next decade belongs to retailers that can turn that demand into an ecosystem: stores, marketplaces, logistics, loyalty, ads, data, and private label working together. In other words, not store versus platform. Store as platform.
Sources: LinkedIn post and source ranking
