Favourite Retailers across European key countries

These four reports aren’t perfectly comparable, and pretending otherwise would break the analysis. France is a different study line altogether, the 2026 “Enseigne préférée des Français” (17th edition), which ranks brands on a fan rate (the share of a category’s buyers who call themselves fans) plus correlation indices. The other three are the 2025 Retail Performance Ranking, scored out of 100 on weighted criteria. The category cuts differ too (France 19 sectors, Austria 10, Spain 9, Poland 6 plus an overall ranking), as do the samples (roughly 12,000, 5,234, 4,500 and 3,541 respondents). So read the cross-country comparisons as directional, not decimal-precise. But the direction is consistent enough to trust.

The most striking finding sits at the top of each ranking. Every country crowns a different overall favourite, and three of the four originated abroad.

France’s winner is Action, the Dutch hard-discounter, top for the fourth year running on a 44.8% fan rate. Spain picks IKEA, the Swedish furniture group, at 75.8 points. Austria goes to dm, the German drugstore chain, at 80.1, the highest score in any of the four reports. Poland is the exception: Allegro, a homegrown marketplace, at 77.3.

Three of the four most-loved national retailers built deeper trust than any local incumbent could and stayed on top from a foreign base. Allegro is the only fully domestic #1, and Poland is the one market where a local marketplace kept Amazon marginal. Amazon barely figures in the Polish rankings at all.

That reframes France. At category level it’s the most fortress-like market in the set, with French names filling almost every podium, yet the country’s single favourite retailer is a Dutch discounter that French shoppers adopted, scaled, and now treat as something close to a national institution. Action’s fan rate has climbed 16 points in six years. Nothing else in the set comes close.

Below the national #1s, three brands repeat at category level across all four reports: IKEA, Decathlon and Leroy Merlin.

IKEA wins the furniture and home category in every market. Decathlon wins sport in France, Spain and Poland, and makes the podium in Austria (third, behind Intersport and Gigasport). Leroy Merlin wins or places in France, Spain and Poland. It doesn’t operate in Austria at all, where Home & Garden goes to Amazon ahead of Germany’s Hornbach and Austria’s Zgonc.

In Spain these same three are the overall podium (IKEA, Leroy Merlin, Decathlon). In France two of them sit in the overall top three, Leroy Merlin second and Decathlon third, with Action taking the crown. No generalist, marketplace or grocer manages this in any market. The common thread is narrow focus plus deep trust. Category specialisation is the one proposition that crosses a border intact.

Amazon wins General and Electronics in Spain and Austria, and Electronics in France. Impressive until you notice where it stops. It never tops the overall ranking in France, where Action, Leroy Merlin and Decathlon sit ahead and Amazon doesn’t reach the top ten. It’s shut out of Poland’s General by Allegro and doesn’t even appear on Poland’s Electronics podium, which is entirely local: Media Expert, RTV Euro AGD, x-kom.

The rule is clean. Where a strong homegrown marketplace or a deeply rooted retail culture already exists, Amazon is capped. Where there’s a vacuum, it fills it. For anyone planning a European entry, that’s the most important line in the four reports. Amazon’s position isn’t a constant you can assume, it’s a function of who already owns the local relationship.

France and Poland are fortresses at category level. France’s podiums are overwhelmingly French: Leclerc, Carrefour, Picard, Fnac, Boulanger, Darty, Sephora, Nocibé, Yves Rocher, plus its two exportable specialists Leroy Merlin and Decathlon. The foreign winners there are the usual travellers (Action, IKEA, Amazon, Zara, Vinted). Poland puts homegrown brands in 14 of 21 podium places, with Electronics and Fashion completely local.

Spain runs, almost, on a single local anchor. El Corte Inglés lands in the top three of seven of its nine categories, a department store doing work no equivalent does anywhere else in the set, surrounded by foreign specialists.

Austria is the outlier in the other direction, the most penetrated of the four and mostly by German brands (dm, Müller, Hofer, MediaMarkt, Hornbach, Zalando) alongside Amazon. Its homegrown winners are thinner on the ground: XXXLutz and mömax in furniture, Gigasport in sport, the Spar group in grocery, refurbed in electronics.

The gradient runs from Austria (open) to Spain (one strong local anchor) to France and Poland (closed at category level, even where the overall #1 is foreign).

The grocery winner tells you what a country optimises for. Discounters win preference in Austria (Hofer, the Aldi Süd banner, at #1) and Poland (Lidl first, then Biedronka). National full-service champions win in France (E.Leclerc) and Spain (Mercadona). It tracks with stated priorities: 33% of Austrians and 38% of French shoppers name affordability their top criterion.

The connective tissue is German discount. Lidl is top-three grocery in both Spain and Poland; Aldi, as Hofer, is #1 in Austria. The discount model exports. The national-champion model, Mercadona and Leclerc, defends a home market and stops at the border.

No global generalist wins beauty in any of the four markets. The category splits cleanly by format. France and Spain run on perfumeries with national champions: Sephora, Nocibé and Yves Rocher in France; Druni and Primor in Spain, two chains most non-Spaniards have never heard of, winning on in-store experience rather than price. Austria and Poland run on drugstores, and here the winners aren’t local at all. dm and Müller lead Austria, Rossmann leads Poland, and all three are German.

So beauty is Amazon-proof everywhere, but only the perfumery half is genuinely homegrown. The drugstore half is another German export, the same pattern as discount. dm’s 80.1 in Austria is the highest score in the entire dataset. A drugstore beats every marketplace and specialist measured, worth sitting with if your category strategy assumes the marketplace always wins.

Only four pure-play retailers win a category outright across the four markets: Allegro (Poland General), Zalando (Austria Fashion), Amazon (General and Electronics in Spain and Austria, Electronics in France), and Vinted (France adult multi-brand fashion). Each is either homegrown or filling a vacuum. Everything else on these podiums is an omnichannel incumbent. The “physical” winners (Leclerc, IKEA, Leroy Merlin, Fnac, Decathlon) all run serious e-commerce, and several run full marketplaces.

Vinted deserves its own flag. France is the one market here where a second-hand C2C platform tops a mainstream fashion category (Zara still wins single-brand adult fashion). In the same market, Shein collapsed through 2025, with web revenue down 50% in January 2026 according to Circana cited by EY-Parthenon, while Temu kept climbing. Re-commerce and C2C are categories to watch, and France is the early signal.

The useful axis isn’t online versus offline. It’s trusted omnichannel incumbent versus everyone else, with re-commerce and AI-assisted discovery emerging as the new categories worth attention.

Average retailer scores on sustainability are sliding across the set. Austria’s “Planet First” consumer segment slipped from 24% to 21% since 2022. Poland’s sustainability criterion dropped from seventh to fourteenth place. France’s average retailer sustainability score sits at 55/100, down two points over six years.

The French data adds the twist. Close to 60% of French households now say they’d pay more for products with strong sustainability credentials, up 20 points on 2025. Among 18-34s, close to 30% say they’d accept a premium above 10%.

So the trend isn’t that people care less. They say they care more, are more willing to pay, and don’t believe retailers have kept up. Retailers aren’t losing the green argument because the market moved on. They’re losing it because the market got more demanding while their scores stayed flat. Different problem, different fix.

Trust is the number-one driver of preference everywhere it’s weighted: 16.8% of the score in Spain, 14.9% in Poland, 14.8% in Austria. In France, trust and product quality are the two strongest correlations with satisfaction (0.82 and 0.83), and in the grocery deep-dive trust tops everything at 0.96. Price barely moves loyalty on its own. France scores low prices at 0.03 on the same correlation index, and Spain ranks store proximity dead last at 3.3%. Price gets a retailer considered. Trust gets it chosen.

Two forward signals worth keeping on the dashboard. Temu is in every report but hasn’t cracked a top three anywhere, sitting fourth in Spain’s generalist ranking and outside the podium in France’s bazar category. Fast-growing, not yet a podium threat. Next year’s reports will show whether that holds, especially with the space Shein’s collapse left open.

The bigger signal is in the French report. 24% of French adults, and 42% of 19-24s, now say they prefer AI tools (ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Mistral) for product research over search engines and marketplaces. Among people already using those tools, 48% have made a purchase decision based solely on AI output, and 53% would buy through a chat interface. The other three reports don’t measure this yet. They will next year, and the answers will reshape visibility for every retailer on these podiums.

There’s no European retail playbook. There are four national ones, and the propositions that reliably cross a border are narrow: trusted category specialisation (IKEA, Decathlon, Leroy Merlin) and the German format machine (Aldi and Lidl in discount, dm, Müller and Rossmann in drugstores). Amazon proves the limit from the top, capped wherever a local champion stands. The four overall #1s prove it again: every market crowns a different brand, and the one country that picked a homegrown champion, Poland with Allegro, is the only one that kept foreign penetration off the top spot.

If you sell into Europe, or plan to, stop looking for the continental strategy. Find out who holds the trust relationship in each category, in each country, and decide whether you can take it from them or have to route around them. In Poland the front door is Allegro, not Amazon. In France the most-loved retailer in the country is a Dutch discounter, and the favourite multi-brand fashion destination is a Lithuanian re-commerce platform. The door sits in a different place in every market, and assuming otherwise is the most expensive mistake on the table.

Source: EY-Parthenon retailer preference studies. France (2026 “Enseigne préférée des Français”, ~12,000 respondents, 213 brands, 19 sectors, fan-rate methodology). Spain, Austria and Poland (2025 Retail Performance Ranking, scored out of 100): Spain 5,234 respondents across 9 categories; Austria ~4,500 respondents across 10 sectors; Poland 3,541 respondents across 6 segments plus an overall ranking, part of a seven-country study covering roughly 56,000 respondents. Figures are not fully harmonised across countries.