3 min. reading

Dutch Ecommerce Growth Trends: Services Boost Online Spending

Even though fewer products were bought, Dutch ecommerce growth trends show a 6% increase in online retail, hitting €17.5 billion. Services, especially health and damage insurance, were the main drivers of this growth. These results came from the Thuiswinkel Markt Monitor study, which was done by GfK for Thuiswinkel.org and Retail Insiders in collaboration with PostNL and Betaalvereniging Nederland. Regardless that almost a third of all retail buying now happens online, only 173 million items were bought, which is 2% less than the year before.

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Dutch Ecommerce Growth Trends: Services Boost Online Spending
Source: Depositphotos (edited in Canva Pro)

Services Drive Dutch Ecommerce Growth Trends

The biggest thing that made Dutch e-commerce grow was services, which went up by 13%. There was a huge 27% rise in health and damage insurance, and ticket sales for sites and events also went up. This was partly because the Olympics was coming to France.

Spending on goods stayed pretty steady, with only a 1% increase, but the number of goods bought went down by 4%. Some categories, like Shoes & Personal Lifestyle and Food/Nearfood, saw an 11% drop.

Varied Online Spending Across Categories

The percentage of online shopping that people do changes a lot between categories. More often than not, people buy services online instead of goods.

For example, only 8% of spending on food and drinks near food happens online, which brings down the total average. When this category is taken out, consumers spend 37% of their retail income on online purchases.

Dutch ecommerce grows 6% in 2024: Services boost spending, cross-border shopping rises.

Source: Thuiswinkel

Cross-Border Shopping: A Rising Trend in Dutch Ecommerce

With a 6% rise to 20.3 million sales made outside of the Netherlands, cross-border shopping is on the rise. Chinese online stores have become very famous. Overall, people spent 16% more at foreign online stores, or €2.3 billion.

In the first half of 2024, Dutch people bought 6 million things from China. Each buy cost an average of €41, which is a lot less than the average in the Netherlands (€101) or other European countries like Germany (€110).

Mobile Spending and Payment Methods

Smartphone sales have plateaued, but their share of all online spending has increased from 25% to 28%, indicating that consumers are spending more money via their mobile devices.

More people have also begun to prefer iDEAL as a payment method, primarily shifting away from credit card usage.

These growing trends in Dutch ecommerce show how online shopping is changing in the Netherlands, with services and shopping across borders becoming more important.

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