50% of global e-commerce payments made via digital wallets

12 September 2023

Analysis from ID Crypt Global reveals that 50% of global e-commerce payments are now made via digital wallets.

With digital wallets already identified as ‘the leading payment method globally,’ ID Crypt has analysed e-commerce revenue across 40 countries in 2022 to reveal how much is now coming from digital wallets.

In 2022, the global e-commerce market generated revenue of £4.9 trillion. Digital wallets accounted for 49% of this, which is £2.4 trillion.

The Asia-Pacific region is the global digital wallet leader, with 69% of e-commerce payments, equivalent to £1.7 trillion, making use of the technology. In North America, 32% of payments came through digital wallets, followed by Europe (29%), Latin America (21%), and the Middle East and Africa (20%). On a national level, the APAC region dominates.

China has the largest e-commerce market in the world, generating revenue of £1.85 trillion in 2022. It’s also the global leader for digital wallet usage which accounts for 81% of this total revenue, equivalent to £1.5 trillion.

In India, 50% of e-commerce revenue came from a digital wallet, and in Indonesia, the figure is 39%.

The UK has the highest proportion of digital wallet revenue outside of the APAC region. The nation’s e-commerce market generated £259 billion in 2022, and £90.6 billion of this, or 35%, came via a digital wallet. The UK is followed by Italy (35%), the Philippines (33%), and USA (32%).

Meanwhile, the lowest use of digital wallets is recorded in Turkey (9%), the Netherlands (9%), and Nigeria (10%).

“The significance of digital wallets is huge. They’re playing a central role in all of our lives, whether we’re paying for goods online or getting on tubes, trains, and buses. And we’re still only at the very beginning of the journey,” said CEO and founder of ID Crypt Global, Lauren Wilson-Smith. “We can look at the digital wallet market in China, where it accounts for 80% of e-commerce revenue, and fully expect the likes of the UK and USA to quickly approach this sort of level. This is because China has a well-established ‘everything app’ called WeChat. Everything apps are so-called because they are a platform from which users do everything, from chatting and texting with friends, to sharing photos, ordering food, buying goods, booking tickets, playing video games, and streaming TV shows and music. The digital wallet is central to the success of everything apps, and the important thing to consider is Elon Musk’s express desire for X, formally Twitter, to become an everything app just like WeChat. If this happens, the role of digital wallets could further explode here in the UK and elsewhere, becoming the absolute norm for decades to come.”