Israelis are doing more and more of their shopping online, averaging two orders per second during 2017, according to the Israel Postal Company. This translated to 61 million packages delivered in Israel from ecommerce retailers, 15 percent more than in 2016, according to press reports.
And that figure does not include packages handled by other services such as GCX, which reported a 50% increase in its Israeli online order deliveries in 2017, adding up to ₪28 million ($8.25 million) of merchandise.
Israel’s population is roughly 8.7 million.
PayPal data shows that Israelis spent some ₪11.8 billion ($3.4 billion) online in 2016 using PayPal for their transactions, and an estimated ₪14 billion in 2017. Black Friday in November, a relatively new phenomenon on the Israeli shopping scene, is the top time for Israeli online shopping activity, followed by Cyber Monday.
What was the postal service busy delivering to Israeli online shoppers in 2017? Clothing, shoes, homeware, accessories, gadgets, vitamins and cosmetics ordered from websites including Ali Express, Asos, eBay, Next, Amazon, Book Depository and iHerb. The service offers citizens online tools for tracking packages shipped from foreign countries.
A Euromonitor International Report from April 2017 cited teenagers and parents of young children as the most avid online shoppers in Israel.
The Israeli city showing the most online shopping per capita is the northern town of Karmiel, which has a population of 50,000 and received a total of 163,000 Israel Post package deliveries in 2017.
The explosion in Israeli ecommerce purchases spurred the Israel Post to open 430 additional distribution centers for parcels in 2017 as well as a 13,000-square-meter online trade center in Modi’in, capable of processing 100 million parcels per year. Recently it signed a lease on a 30,000-square-meter space in the Modi’in industrial zone to house offices and logistics for the online trade center.
Amazon reportedly is in negotiations to rent 25,000 square meters of storage space in central Israel in order to lower shipping costs for Israeli customers.