The Maze: Europe has several versions of the first delivery option a shopper sees. Tembi, a checkout market intelligence provider, compared nine European markets in October 2026. Its percentages measure webshops with each delivery method listed first, among shops where that method could be identified. Home delivery leads in Switzerland and the UK. Staffed parcel shops lead in Denmark; self-service lockers lead in Estonia. That is a comparison of checkout presentation.
Home delivery dominates some markets but shares the stage in others. It appears first at 89% of Swiss webshops and 87% of UK webshops in the comparison. Norway is lower at 68%, followed by Belgium at 60% and Greece at 56%. These are separate national observations, without a Europe-wide average. For a retailer entering one of these markets, local first-position ordering offers a benchmark for how competitors present delivery. It cannot establish which option its own customers will choose.
Denmark and Estonia put different collection models first. In Denmark, parcel shops lead at 59%, against home delivery at 34%. In Estonia, lockers lead at 71%, against home delivery at 20%. A parcel shop has staff who hand over the order; a locker lets the customer collect it from a compartment. Both move collection away from home, but their hours, locations and handover arrangements differ. Copying Denmark's emphasis on staffed collection into Estonia would miss the particular method that leads there.
The middle of the comparison resists a simple home-or-locker split. Sweden has home delivery first at 54% of webshops and parcel shops at 36%. Finland is more mixed: home delivery is first at 43%, lockers at 26% and parcel shops at 16%. Norway's parcel-shop and locker shares are 20% and 11%. Belgium's shop share is 28%; Greece has shops at 20% and lockers at 22%. A retailer can therefore face several familiar delivery routes within one market. The relevant question includes which route leads the menu, alongside which routes exist.
First position describes a retailer decision before it describes customer demand. Tembi's methodology describes automated visits to checkout that record delivery methods, prices and ordering. The October comparison supplies no sample size or weighting detail. It measures neither shoppers' preferences nor parcel volumes, and provides no conversion result from changing the order. Smaller source segments without printed values are grouped in the accompanying visual as an unlabelled remainder. They cannot support claims that an unprinted method has zero presence. There is also no time series from which to infer quarterly change.
A shared checkout design still needs a local delivery strategy. The observed ordering could reflect carrier coverage, commercial agreements, retailer choices or customer expectations; this evidence does not separate those explanations. The strategic implication is conditional: if local collection networks shape the delivery choices retailers can offer competitively, a single international default may fit some markets poorly. The cost of expansion then includes building the right delivery relationships, alongside translating the checkout. First-position shares help identify that question; local operating and customer evidence must answer it.
Why it matters: Cross-border retail scale does not automatically produce one delivery proposition. These nine markets show different retailer defaults, including two distinct collection models. A common checkout system can support those differences, but it cannot supply the missing carrier relationships or establish the best option for a particular business. The useful competitive benchmark is a local delivery offer that a retailer can actually operate, followed by a test of how its customers respond.
