Foreign-headquartered platforms accounted for an estimated 54% of website traffic in travel and accommodation booking across OECD countries in 2024, compared with 46% in ride-hailing and carpooling, according to a new OECD analysis. The figures show how online intermediaries connect customers and suppliers across borders, while also exposing differences between markets.
The OECD paper, published on September 30, analyzes website traffic for close to 860 platforms across OECD member countries from 2010 to 2024. It covers travel booking, ride services and online marketplaces.
Traffic is a proxy for platform reach. It is not the value of sales, the number of completed bookings or a measure of the profits earned by sellers. A platform headquartered abroad can also serve a domestic transaction, so the figures are not measures of cross-border trade itself.
What a platform does for a seller
An online intermediary brings buyers and sellers together, often providing search, payments, ratings and other services. The OECD also examines hybrid businesses that combine intermediation with direct sales or physical services such as warehousing.
A small hotel or retailer may use an established platform to reach customers who would otherwise be difficult to find. The platform’s audience and payment tools can reduce some of the effort needed to enter a market, although the seller remains responsible for delivering the product or service under the applicable arrangements.
Access is not free simply because a listing is online. Businesses may pay commissions, advertising charges or fulfillment fees. They may also need to manage returns, taxes, exchange rates and customer support in another market.
For physical products, a successful listing still depends on the delivery promise. In our reporting on online shopping problems, delayed deliveries were the most frequently reported issue in a 2025 EU survey of recent online shoppers.
Website visits are not the same as market share in sales
For online marketplaces, the OECD estimates foreign-headquartered platforms attracted an average of 33% of traffic when only pure intermediaries were counted, rising to 45% when hybrid platforms were included.
The different totals reflect the business models included. They do not tell a retailer what proportion of sales a particular marketplace will generate, or whether any individual company is profitable.
Website traffic also misses parts of platform activity, including some use through apps. The research cannot determine how many visitors completed a purchase or whether the same individuals visited competing services.
The OECD describes limited competitive pressure on the largest online marketplaces in its sample, with smaller entrants contributing relatively little to changes in market structure. Travel booking and ride services showed different patterns, so the findings should not be applied uniformly to every digital service.
Rules and competition affect the route to customers
The analysis compares platform traffic with measures of restrictions on digitally enabled services, including certain payment, licensing and local-presence requirements. In some cases, less restrictive scores were associated with greater traffic to foreign-headquartered platforms.
The OECD cautions that these are correlations. Rules may affect platform growth, but governments may also introduce rules in response to existing platform activity. The analysis cannot establish the effect of removing an individual rule.
Some rules address security, consumer protection or other public interests. Businesses entering a market need to assess their obligations as well as the potential cost of meeting them.
Before relying on one intermediary, a seller can compare the total cost per completed order with alternatives, including returns and advertising, and check how it can retrieve customer and transaction records. The European Commission’s platform-to-business rules address transparency and fairness for business users of online intermediation services in the EU. The applicable protections depend on the service and circumstances.
A platform can supply an audience quickly. Whether that audience becomes a durable foreign business depends on repeat customers, reliable fulfillment and the margin remaining after every cost of the sale.
