Ecommerce in The Netherlands

The Netherlands is a small country, but it always tries to play a significant role, whether it be economically, political or in sports. The Netherlands participated in the introduction of the euro and was also a founding member of NATO and what’s now called the European Union. It’s also famous for its highly open economy which is leaning strongly towards international trade. Here’s everything you need to know about ecommerce in the Netherlands:

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Content:

• Ecommerce events in the Netherlands
• Ecommerce customers in the Netherlands
• The ecommerce market in the Netherlands
• Big online stores in the Netherlands
• Latest ecommerce news from or about the Netherlands

Ecommerce events in the Netherlands

Every year there are several ecommerce events being organized in the Netherlands. We have a handy ecommerce events calendar, where you can find all the major online retail events in Europe.

Ecommerce customers in the Netherlands

Based on data from 2019, an impressive share of 97 percent of the Dutch population has access to the internet. Data from the Thuiswinkel Markt Monitor 2020 shows there are 13.8 million online shoppers in the Netherlands. The Dutch like to pay with iDeal, an online payment method developed by the Dutch banking community. Among the other popular online payment methods in the Netherlands are PayPal, MasterCard and VISA. Popular post-payment methods are AfterPay, acceptgiro (giro transfer) and Klarna.

The most popular product categories in Dutch ecommerce are travel & tickets (38.96%), followed by telecommunication (12.82%), consumer electronica (7.84%), computer hardware and software (7.57%), clothing and shoes (7.48%) and media (6.36%).

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In 2018, about 35 percent of online shoppers in the Netherlands used their smartphones to purchase something over the internet.

The ecommerce market in the Netherlands

The Dutch ecommerce industry was worth 26.6 billion euros in 2020. That’s an estimated growth of 7 percent compared to the situation in 2019. Online sales in the Netherlands currently account for 10.3 percent of the country’s total retail industry.

Big online stores in the Netherlands

The biggest online stores in the Netherlands are Bol.com (the biggest for quite some years now), Wehkamp, Zalando, Coolblue, H&M, Hema and Thuisbezorgd.nl. If you look at this list, it’s directly noticeable that almost all of these are local players, with exceptions for Zalando (Germany) and H&M (Sweden). Amazon and eBay, for example, aren’t that big in the Netherlands. This is mostly because consumers are very hooked on Wehkamp.nl and Bol.com, two players that are online for over 20 years. But also because the Dutch really like to pay online with iDeal, and that’s something those international players didn’t or still don’t offer. But that might change, as Amazon launched in the Netherlands in 2020.

Read all our articles about ecommerce in The Netherlands.

Want to read more about Dutch ecommerce?

If you are interested in more news about ecommerce in the Netherlands, and if you don’t mind that it’s in Dutch, please visit Ecommerce News Nederland (Google Translate-version here). And if you’re interested in Dutch ecommerce and entrepreneurship, you can visit Ondernemen & Internet (Google Translate-version here).

Last update: March 2021