Ecommerce in Belgium: €9.1 billion in 2016

Ecommerce in Belgium was worth 9.1 billion euros in 2016. Last year, consumers spent 10 percent more on products and services online than they did in 2015. The online share of total retail has increased from 14 to 16 percent.

This is apparent from the latest BeCommerce Markt Monitor, a benchmark study on the Belgian ecommerce industry by ecommerce association BeCommerce and in association with PostNL, Google and Worldline.

Last year, about 8.4 million Belgian consumers made 85 million online purchases together. This means the average online consumer in Belgium made 10 online purchases per year, spending 9.34 euros per purchase.

Ecommerce is becoming more and more a significant factor in the Belgian retail industry. In 2015, online accounted for 14 percent of all spending, while this share increased to 16 percent last year. It’s especially services which are popular online: 63 percent of spending on services happened online, while just 8 percent of spending on products happened this way.

Popular product categories in Belgium

In terms of online purchases, tickets and accommodation are the most popular category: here, 85 percent of purchases are spent online. Tickets and events (74 percent) and package holidays (66 percent) are also popular. Biggest growth however, happened in the (near)food category, which happened to grow 135 percent last year.

13 percent of online spending happened via mobile devices

Last year, 55 percent of online spending happened using a laptop, while the desktop accounted for 30 percent. The smartphone was used for 4 percent of online spending in Belgium, while the tablet accounted for 9 percent. According to BeCommerce, mobile spending is still on the rise, which is at the expense of purchases via the desktop.

In Belgium, there are two very different parts: Flanders and Wallonia. In the first part of Belgium, online shopping increased by 12 percent to 5.5 billion euros, while in Wallonia, the ecommerce industry grew 7 percent to be worth 3.6 billion euros at the end of 2016.