‘5,000 new online stores in Belgium every year’

For the coming years, the online retail association BeCommerce thinks Belgium will welcome about 5,000 new online stores every year. If the expected growth continues, Belgian consumers will be able to shop at more online stores than physical ones by 2020.

BeCommerce published its predictions last Friday. About 5,000 new ecommerce sites every year means on average 14 online stores will be launched every day. And if this trend continues soon there will be more online stores than brick-and-mortar stores.

The number of Belgian online stores continues to grow hard. Only five years there were just about 10,000 online stores active in the Western European country, but nowadays this number has increased to almost 25,000. And this growth will only increase further, Carine Moitier of BeCommerce thinks. “Every year about 5,000 new stores will see the daylight. The biggest share (70%) of that growth will come from retailers who switch from one channel to more sales channels”, she says. According to the association more and more merchants decide to start an online store next to their traditional point of sale. “It’s not an unnecessary luxury, if you want to deal with the fierce competition.”

Ecommerce in Belgium
Two months ago, BeCommerce shared some insights in the Belgian ecommerce industry. Online spendings were worth 2.1 billion euros during the first quarter of 2015. The expectation back then was that about 80 million purchases will be conducted online until the end of the year and these online purchases will be worth 7 billion euros.