Below you’ll find all the articles we’ve written about ecommerce, online retailers, acquisitions, cross-border initiatives and more that takes place in the Benelux: Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg. If you want to know more about this region’s online retail industry, check out our information page on ecommerce in Benelux.
TikTok Shop is preparing to launch in Poland, the Netherlands and Belgium. This is evident from job listings for its “strategic readiness team” and for customer solutions managers who are fluent in Polish or Dutch. Seller environments have already been set up, but they are not yet live.
Amazon will charge European selling partners additional transport costs as a result of the war in the Middle East. In principle, the measure is temporary, the company says, and applies to both Fulfilment by Amazon (FBA) and Multi-Channel Fulfilment (MCF).
Yesterday, the winners of the prestigious Shopping Awards were announced, in the Netherlands. It was the 25th edition. Kaartje2go won the ‘DHL Best Online Store of the Year’ award, making it the overall winner of the evening.
Online marketplace integrator ChannelEngine has expanded its partnership with Monta, a Dutch fulfillment provider. The fulfillment solution is now integrated with ChannelEngine’s platform, which means that online sellers can manage marketplace and fulfillment processes in one single ecosystem.
Last year, consumers in the Netherlands spent 35.7 billion euros online. This represents a 1 percent decrease in online spending compared to 2024. At the same time, Dutch consumers are increasingly ordering from abroad, as the number of cross-border purchases rose by 9 percent.
Online marketplace integrator ChannelEngine is launching a new capability, called AI Attribute Builder, in April. The company wants to ensure that products from online retailers will remain visible in AI-driven discovery environments.
Dutch companies can now apply to sell on Otto.de. This marks the beginning of Otto’s expansion to marketplace partners from other European countries. If accepted onto the platform, Dutch sellers must provide customer service in German.
European Amazon sellers can now manage their funds on the platform more easily. Amazon Seller Wallet is launching in seven European stores. This gives sellers more control over when to convert and transfer their earnings, with exchange rates displayed before every transfer.
Last year, 54 percent of new online stores in the Netherlands were created with Shopify. In France, that share came to 49 percent and in Spain, it was 41 percent. At the same time, the share of Prestashop among new stores has dropped in these countries.
Only 28 percent of the 100 largest online stores in Belgium and the Netherlands offer customer service in the evening. And only 44 percent use WhatsApp as a customer service channel, even though the app is very popular among consumers. As a result, online stores are missing out on conversions.
Dutch marketplace Bol is introducing ‘a completely new ecosystem category’: third-party fulfillment, or 3PL for short. The market leader is looking for logistics companies that can help partner sellers with warehouse space and processing orders. Currently, sellers can only outsource fulfillment to Bol itself, but soon they will also be able to outsource to other fulfillment companies within the network.
Product discovery still mostly happens on marketplaces, with 37 percent of consumers starting their shopping journey there. Compared to last year, this is a decrease of 10 percent. Social platforms and AI assistants have increased their share in the last 12 months.
The adoption of ecommerce varies widely across European regions: from 21.7 percent in Yugoiztochen, in the southeast of Bulgaria, to 91.5 percent in the Dutch province of Utrecht. A new map from statistics agency Eurostat clearly visualizes these differences.
Temu has recently entered into a large number of partnerships with logistics service providers for the delivery of products across Europe. This week, deals with the United Kingdom’s Royal Mail and Belgium’s bpost were announced.
Only three years after launching a dedicated online store for Belgium, Amazon has grown into the country’s second-largest online retailer. The company is investing heavily in Belgium. Part of the investment is going toward same-day delivery from Amazon’s distribution center in Hoboken, near Antwerp.