Online sales in the Netherlands increased by 10% in 2018, with consumers spending €23.7 billion on products and services, according to the Dutch e-commerce association Thuiswinkel.org.
In 2018, 96% of Dutch consumers aged 15 and older made one or more online purchases of products and services, a 15% increase on the previous year.
These figures are part of the 2018 Thuiswinkel Markt Monitor which is a survey on online consumer spending in the Netherlands, carried out by GfK and commissioned by Thuiswinkel.org, in collaboration with PostNL.
Wijnand Jongen, director of Thuiswinkel.org, said: "In total, online spending on products amounted to €13.1 billion in 2018 which brings the share of the e-commerce industry within the entire retail sector to 9.6%. This means an increase of 0.5 percentage points compared to 2017. With the growth in the number of Dutch consumers shopping via internet and the ever-increasing market share of online sales, we can state that e-commerce is playing an increasingly important role in the retail sector.”
The fastest-growing product category in Dutch e-commerce last year was food/related with an increase of 24%. Compared to a year earlier (+35%), the growth of online spending in this segment levelled off somewhat, but on the other hand, the number of online purchases in this category rose more than in 2017 (from 25% to 31%).
During the fourth quarter of 2018, Dutch consumers spent more than in the same period a year earlier. Partly thanks to retail events such as Black Friday, Singles' Day, Sinterklaas and Christmas, the total spending at Dutch web shops amounted to €7.2 billion, an 11% increase compared to Q4 2017. This growth was largely due to the increase in online spending on services (+14%): 82% of all spending on services was made in the fourth quarter of 2018 (compared to 79% in Q4 2017), representing an amount of € 3.5 billion.
The role of smartphones in Dutch e-commerce has become more important in 2018. Whereas in the last three months of 2017, 28% of online buyers used their smartphone during an online purchase, the figure rose to 35% in Q4 2018. This increase is mainly at the expense of the use of notebooks and computers, as a result of which the smartphone has now passed the computer on the list of most frequently used devices for online shopping.
During the last three months of 2018, 12% of all online purchases were made via smartphone, compared to only 9% in in the same period last year.
