Orders grew 14 percent, revenue grew five

Vilkas Group’s e-commerce index reports two numbers for the third quarter of 2025. Finnish e-commerce grew by almost five percent in euros. Order volume grew by fourteen.

The index is built on actual transactions from nearly two thousand Finnish online stores, so this is not a survey. It is what happened at the checkout.

A threefold gap between orders and euros means one thing: average order value collapsed. The same people come more often and leave less behind.

Why that is worse than it sounds

Revenue grew. The report has a plus sign on it. That is where many people stop reading.

But almost nothing in an e-commerce cost structure scales in euros. It scales in orders.

Picking costs the same per order. Packing costs the same. Shipping costs the same. Handling a return costs the same. Payment processing takes a fixed share plus a transaction fee. And customer acquisition — the click, the conversion, the ad euro — costs the same whether the basket holds 40 euros or 120.

So when order volume grows three times faster than revenue, every fixed per-order cost grows three times faster than the money meant to cover it.

The same thing as arithmetic

Take a store with a 100-euro average order and a 35 percent gross margin. Order handling, shipping and payment take 12 euros. Customer acquisition costs 15 euros per order.

€35 margin − €12 handling − €15 acquisition = €8 left

Now the average order falls to 88 euros, which is roughly what those two numbers together imply. The margin percentage holds. Handling and acquisition do not move, because neither depends on basket size.

€30.80 margin − €12 − €15 = €3.80 left

Revenue grew. More orders came in. And less than half the margin per order survives.

This is the situation where the Google Ads report still looks fine. ROAS does not move, because ROAS is calculated on revenue rather than on what reaches the bottom line. The account can look the best it ever has at the same time as the company makes less profit.

Why you cannot answer with price

There is a third number in the Vilkas report, and it is the one to take seriously: if nothing changes, the market share of Finnish small and mid-sized e-commerce could fall to a critical five percent as early as mid-2026. The cause is consumer price sensitivity and purchases moving to Chinese stores.

The temptation is to answer with price. That is a losing bet, and not because Finnish retail is weak. It is a losing bet because the other side has a different cost structure: not the same VAT, not the same shipping, not the same returns logistics, not the same product liability. Price competition is won by whoever has lower costs, and that is not you.

What is left

What is left is the part price competition does not decide: who you advertise to, and which products you pay for traffic on.

If acquisition costs the same per order regardless of basket size, then every ad euro should go where the order is largest and the margin thickest. In most accounts the opposite happens, and the reason is structural: the whole feed goes in, the algorithm optimises for the number of conversions, and the most conversions come from cheap products. The machine is doing exactly what it was asked. It was simply asked the wrong thing.

Three things you can look at in your own account this week:

1. Segment products by margin, not by sales. If the Shopping structure does not know which product is profitable, it cannot favour it.
2. Calculate acquisition in euros per order, not as ROAS. Compare it to the margin on an average order in euros. If the latter is smaller, the advertising is loss-making whatever the report says.
3. Track average order value for ad-driven orders separately. If it is falling faster than elsewhere, the advertising is specifically buying the cheap orders.

Growth that eats margin is not growth. It is just busier.

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Figures: Vilkas Group, E-commerce Index Q3/2025, published 23 October 2025, based on transactions from nearly 2,000 Finnish online stores.