Ecommerce in the Netherlands: €23.7 billion in 2018

Ecommerce in the Netherlands was worth 23.7 billion euros in 2018. That’s an estimated growth of 10 percent compared to the situation one year before. Last year, 96 percent of consumers aged 15 and over have purchased something online at least once.

These are some of the figures released by the annual Thuiswinkel Markt Monitor, a research study conducted by Dutch ecommerce association Thuiswinkel.org. The 23.7 billion euros Dutch consumer spent online were spent on a total of 242 million online purchases of both products and services.

Last year, 13.1 billion euros was spent online on the purchase of products. This means ecommerce in the Netherlands now accounts for 9.6 percent of the country’s total retail industry.

‘Ecommerce increasingly important within the retail trade’

“It’s an increase of 0.5 percentage points compared to the situation one year before”, Thuiswinkel.org director Wijnand Jongen explains. “With the growth in numbers of Dutch consumers shopping online and the ever-increasing market share of ecommerce we might conclude ecommerce is playing an increasingly significant role in the Dutch retail industry.”

Food/nearfood fastest-growing product category

The fastest-growing product category in the Netherlands last year was food/nearfood. This category increased by 24 percent. That’s less than in 2017, when the food/nearfood category increased by 35 percent, but when we just look at the number of purchases within this category it is an improvement however: a growth of 31 percent last year, compared to 25 percent one year before.

Mcommerce in the Netherlands

Thuiswinkel.org also examined the role the smartphone is playing when it comes to using a type of device while shopping online. Two years ago, 28 percent of online shoppers in the Netherlands used their smartphones to purchase something over the internet, while last year this share increased to 35 percent. During the fourth quarter of last year, 12 percent of all online purchases happened on a mobile phone.