The Netherlands

As of yesterday, Dutch fulfillment company Active Ants has been fully acquired by Belgian postal company Bpost. The acquisition was already announced in 2018, but at that time management remained in the hands of Active Ants. Now, the company has sold its remaining stake to Bpost.

HelloFresh Group has expanded its ready-to-eat brand, Factor, to the Netherlands and the Flanders region in Belgium. Other countries on the continent will follow suit. "Bringing Factor to Europe is a significant stride in HelloFresh's multi-tier brand strategy."

Ecommerce giant Amazon has opened its first fulfillment center in the Netherlands. With the new location, the online marketplace will be able to deliver Dutch orders faster. The launch is part of a collaboration with Dutch logistics company Bleckmann.

In 2022, Dutch online department store Wehkamp, made 433 million euros in turnover. This is a decrease of 9 percent compared to the year before. The company’s net loss came to 22 million euros.

Swedish Logent Group has signed an agreement for a majority stake in Misi. The acquisition of this Dutch fulfilment company is expected to be completed next month. It is unknown how much money Logent paid for the majority stake.

Amazon wants to open a distribution centre in the Netherlands of 100,000 square metres. The ecommerce giant has been operating there since 2015 and has a Dutch online store since 2020. Currently, it delivers most orders from a delivery centre at Schiphol Airport, while its products come from Germany.

Consumers in the Netherlands expect to spend 37 percent of their total expenditures online by 2028. This is five percentage points higher than the actual percentage in 2022. Still, the expectation has declined: last year, consumers expected to spend 41 percent of their expenditures online in five years.

Today, Sendcloud announced the acquisition of data platform Tracey. The acquisition allows Sendcloud to offer new data tools, such as AI-driven delivery predictions and near-real-time package monitoring. In this way, the shipping platform aims to offer the best customer experience.

Last year, more than 1.2 billion payments in the Netherlands were fulfilled through iDeal, the popular local payment method. This is an increase of 7.9 percent compared to 2021. The online payment method shows strong growth, despite a decrease of 5 percent in ecommerce purchases within the country.

Ecommerce giant Amazon is imperceptibly tracking visitors' online behavior after they leave the marketplace. Even when they did not give permission for cookies to be placed. The Dutch Foundation for Data Protection (SDBN) is starting a mass claim, as at least five million Dutch customers have been duped.

Global fulfillment platform ShipBob is expanding to the Netherlands with the launch of a fulfillment center. The new fulfillment center is the company’s fifth European location. The company expects to start shipping parcels from the new location in July.

The Lithuania-based online supplier of prefabricated wooden buildings, Pineca, is launching an online store in the Netherlands. This is the company’s second expansion within Europe in this year. The company is already active in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Portugal as well.

Action, the discount retailer from the Netherlands, is launching its online store in Belgium. The online shop is available in Dutch and French. Action will offer around 150 products. The product range mostly consists of large items such as garden furniture.

Bol.com, the leading marketplace in the Netherlands and Belgium, had a gross merchandise volume of 1.3 billion euros in Q1. As much as 65 percent comes from third party merchants on the platform. Bol.com currently has 52,000 partners.

On January 1^st, the Netherlands had more online stores than brick-and-mortar stores. The number of online stores was 84.1 thousand, while the number of physical stores was 82.1 thousand. In a year, the number of online stores rose 4.1 percent.