The Netherlands

About 14% of orders that were placed on online stores in the Netherlands during the first three months of 2014 came from foreign customers. This percentage has almost doubled compared to the first quarter of last year, when it was less than 8%. So, the share of foreign orders on Dutch online stores is rising, however it's still low compared to other European countries.

Takeaway.com has received 74 million euros worth of funding from investment companies Macquarie Capital and Prime Ventures. It’s not the first time the Dutch company, specialized in online food ordering and home delivery, got funding as it received an investment of 13 million euros from Prime Ventures back in 2012.

The ecommerce market in the Netherlands has grown with 8.5% to reach 10.6 billion euros. It’s for the first time ever Dutch online stores together sell more than ten billion euros. The number of online orders also grew, thanks to a rise of 11% there were almost 100 million orders last year.

Dutch company WebwinkelKeur has announced today the launch of its Spanish equivalent eValor. In the Netherlands, WebwinkelKeur is known for the fact merchants can put its trade mark on their site, after which a page with customer experiences is implemented.

The Dutch hosted ecommerce solution SEOshop has gone cross-border for the first time ever. Last week, SEOshop opened its doors in Frankfurt. The German market isn’t an unknown area for the Dutch company, as it sells its software to German entrepreneurs for quite some time now. After a strong start in Germany, SEOshop expects to conquer a huge part of the German market by opening a local office.

One of the statistics you can use when you talk about a country’s ecommerce situation, is the number of online stores. But it is also something that’s hard to know for sure. We took it upon ourselves to recount the number of online stores in The Netherlands. And guess what? There seems to be much more than one might think!

Vente-Privee wants to more than quadruple its revenue in the next ten years. The online retailers wants to achieve this by extending the model of flash sales that it once started in France. The goal is to achieve annual sales of 6 billion euros to 8 billion euros in 2024.

Although the majority of Dutch web merchants think their online store will be still active in 2020, but practice proves otherwise. Almost half of Dutch online entrepreneurs have had a revenue smaller than 10,000 euros in 2012. About 80% have never even earned an average income with their online store.

Dutch music store Bax-shop opened its German online store this week. It’s the second foreign expansion for the Dutch company, that also has a physical store in hometown Goes. Co-founder Jochanan Bax previously told he expects to ship 50.000 parcels to customers in the very first year Bax-shop will be active in Germany.

Fonq.nl, an online department store, will be expanding further in Europe. This year it wants to open online stores in The United Kingdom, Austria and Scandinavia. It’s also planning to acquire other online shops to further expand its product line.

The total online economy of sold goods and services in Western Europe amounted €158.1 billion last year, but is expected to grow to €173.8 billion in 2013, according to new data from Ecommerce Europe, an umbrella organisation for online retailers active in Europe.

Slightly more than 12 percent of the total online sales during the holiday season in Europe will come from mobile devices like smartphones and tablets. That’s an increase of 68 percent compared to the same period a year ago. The growth in Europe is bigger than the mobile holiday sales growth in the United States.

When does a country have a lot of ecommerce potential? Is it about population size, income per capita or the amount of money online spent? It’s all of these and a lot more variables that characterizes a ecommerce market primed for growth. Forrester compared 55 countries, and of the 10 most ecommerce-ready markets, there are 5 European countries: UK, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden.

Ecommerce sales in the Netherlands grew to 5 billion Euros in the first six months of 2013, a growth of 8% compared to the same period one year ago. Although the growth flattens slightly when you compare it with previous years, it´s still a good ecommerce year for the Dutch. Especially when you take into consideration the country is still in a recession and consumers now aren’t that eager to spend money.

Wehkamp.nl wants to reduce the amount of returns of fashion items, its top-selling category. The biggest online clothing store of the Netherlands has to deal with return rates around fifty percent. It now wants to reduce this by measuring all their clothes, so customers will return less ill-fitting articles.