The Dutch Webshop Market Is Shrinking: What the Survivors Do

How fast is the Dutch webshop market shrinking?

The Dutch webshop market is contracting, and it is happening faster than most owners realise. Statistics Netherlands counts 99,795 webshops and mail-order businesses in the third quarter of 2026. Six months earlier that counter still stood above one hundred thousand. Convert the quarterly series into months and more than 700 webshops are currently dropping out of the statistics every month.

That sounds like a collapsing market. It is not, and that difference is exactly where this gets interesting. Dutch consumers spent 35.7 billion euro online in 2025, a decline of 1% compared to 2024. One percent. Demand has barely gone anywhere. The number of sellers has.

That is not a downturn. It is a thinning out. Roughly the same money stays on the table, spread across noticeably fewer stores. For anyone still standing, that is good news, provided you are on the right side of the line.

Which is the question this article tries to answer: what separates the shops that disappear from the shops that remain? Not on instinct, but on what is visible in the figures from Statistics Netherlands, Thuiswinkel.org, the European Commission and Baymard.

The short answer: the survivors do not compete on price. They cannot, because the cheapest offer now comes out of a supply chain a Dutch one-person business will never undercut. What they do instead is give people a reason to come back, and make the road to the checkout shorter than the one next door. Both can be built. Neither is free.

Why are webshops closing while spending has barely dropped?

That 1% decline hides two movements running against each other. The number of online purchases stayed flat at 347 million, spending on products grew by 2%, and the services sector fell in both purchases (-11%) and spending (-5%). Travel, tickets and events pulled the total down.

That means something uncomfortable for anyone who read the headline and concluded that selling online is on its way out. For brands that sell things, the market simply grew last year. And inside that growth sat categories that stood out considerably.

Those figures come from the same market monitor. Put them next to the Statistics Netherlands count and "the market is collapsing" no longer fits. What does fit: the same money, divided among fewer stores.

Who is disappearing sits in that same table. Of the 99,795 webshops, 84,360 have exactly one working person. More than four in five Dutch webshops are therefore a one-person business. That is the long tail, and it is the layer that falls away first once growth stalls. Not because those owners are worse at it, but because they have the least buffer and have to do the most themselves.

So the thinning hits mainly the segment without a brand, without an audience of its own and without a distinctive offer. Precisely the segment that kept competing on price the longest.

Where is the money leaking to?

Part of the money Dutch shops are missing does not stay in the Netherlands. 13% of online spending and purchases goes to foreign webshops, worth 4.5 billion euro (+2%) and 45 million purchases (+9%).

Read those two percentages next to each other once more, because that is where the story is. The number of cross-border purchases grew four times as fast as cross-border spending. Dutch shoppers are clearly ordering abroad more often, but for less money per order. The average foreign basket got smaller, not bigger.

This is not luxury importing. This is the cheap end of the market pulling traffic and volume away from the entry-level range of Dutch shops. If your offer depends mainly on a sharp price, you are now competing with a chain that is structurally cheaper than yours will ever be. That fight is not won with a discount code.

It is also exactly why "let us just drop the price" is so often the beginning of the end. Your margin shrinks, your ad budget shrinks with it, and the problem you were running from is still standing there three months later. We wrote a separate piece about it, because it is the most common reflex we meet in new clients: cheap is not enough.

There is one nuance to hold on to here, otherwise you draw the wrong conclusion. That foreign offer mostly takes the purchases where the customer has no preference. A phone case, a cable, a set of storage boxes. The moment something is at stake, such as fit, shelf life, warranty or something that has to match the rest of the room, delivery time and recourse weigh more heavily than three euro of difference. That is the space where Dutch shops do win, and it is a larger space than the panic stories suggest.

In practice that means: look at which part of your range is bought purely on price and which part is bought on trust. You are going to lose the first part, however hard you work. The second part is where your margin and your repeat purchases come from. Plenty of shops defend exactly the wrong part, because that happens to be the part with the most volume.

The exception that proves the rule: brands that take on cross-border themselves. Anyone who puts their brand into Germany or Belgium is fishing in a pond many times larger than the Dutch one. That does take more than a translated product page, as we work out in selling cross-border in Germany.

What changed on 1 July for parcels from outside the EU?

Something is moving at the cheap end of that comparison, and it is worth knowing by how much. The European Commission introduced a temporary flat customs duty of 3 euro per tariff line on consignments up to 150 euro from outside the EU as of 1 July 2026, a measure running until 1 July 2028. The old exemption has lapsed.

Per tariff line means: per type of product, not per parcel. The Commission gives the worked example itself. Five T-shirts in one consignment fall under one tariff line and therefore cost three euro. A consignment with one T-shirt and one watch counts as two tariff lines and costs 6 euro.

The scale this applies to explains why Brussels stepped in. In 2025, 5.9 billion low-value consignments entered the EU, and in targeted inspections more than 60% of the products checked did not meet EU standards.

What this means for you depends on where your stock sits. Sell from a Dutch or European warehouse and your price disadvantage narrows slightly without you doing anything. Ship yourself from a warehouse outside the EU, through dropshipping, an external fulfilment partner or print-on-demand, and your checkout total goes up while your European competitor's does not.

One more change landed on top of that this summer, and it can hit you quietly. Shopify Managed Markets ended support for delivered duty unpaid on 24 August 2026 and switched all affected markets to delivered duty paid. Import duties and taxes are settled in the checkout since then, instead of at the door by the courier. Fairer for the customer, because there is no surprise bill on the doormat. But it also means your total price visibly went up without you changing anything. If you sell outside the EU, compare your conversion in those markets with the weeks before.

What do the webshops that survive do differently?

After six years of building brands for e-commerce, we see three things come back in the shops that get through this thinning. None of the three is a trick.

They have a reason to exist that is not the price. That sounds soft until you turn it around: if a customer puts your shop next to two others and the only difference is the amount, then you buy every single order with margin. The shops that stay standing have something that stops the comparison. An own product line, a range curated by someone who actually knows the category, a guarantee nobody else gives, or simply a brand people remember. How you build that is written out in building an e-commerce brand.

They are recognisable at the moment it counts. Not on their homepage, but in the place where the customer sees them first: an ad, a marketplace listing, a search result, a parcel on the doormat. In that context brand identity is not a matter of taste but a memory aid, and it shows up directly in what people are willing to pay. We work that connection out in brand identity and revenue.

They remove friction instead of piling marketing on top of it. This is the dullest of the three and usually the fastest. Traffic costs money, every month again. A checkout that lets fewer people walk away costs work once and pays back every month after that.

Look at where you stand, too. In the Statistics Netherlands count, 24,205 webshops sit in clothing and 16,080 in home and garden. Those are by far the busiest categories in the country. If you sell there, distinctiveness is not a luxury you arrange later. It is the reason somebody picks you and not the twenty-four thousand others.

How do you know which side of the line you are on?

Market figures are useful right up to the moment you ask what they mean for your shop. No national average helps there. What does help is a handful of signals from your own data that you can check within an hour.

The sharpest signal is one most owners would rather not test. Switch your ads off for a week and see what remains. If a floor of orders stays standing, you have a brand. If it falls to almost nothing, you do not have a webshop but an advertising channel with a payment page attached. That distinction decides how vulnerable you are the moment click prices rise again.

Four other signals answer the same question from a different angle:

That last row costs you an afternoon and returns the most. Ask your last fifty customers literally. If the answer is almost always about price, you know where you stand in the fight from the previous two sections. Your competitor is then not the webshop three streets away, but a supply chain that structurally works cheaper than yours.

If you get answers about a product they could not find anywhere else, about how quickly someone replied to a question, or about how the parcel looked, then you hold something a discount code cannot compete away. That is exactly the asset that survives the thinning. And it is measurable too: those shops can lower their ad budget without revenue moving down at the same pace.

Count the fields in your checkout

The fastest win is almost never in more visitors. It is in the last five screens before payment. Baymard averages fifty separate studies into a mean of 70.22% cart abandonment. That figure gets quoted everywhere and is of little use on its own, because part of that walking away can never be removed.

More useful is the breakdown of reasons, with the group that was only browsing left out. Note one thing while reading: these reasons come from a panel of US shoppers. Take them as direction, not as a Dutch benchmark.

All six percentages sit on the Baymard source page. Look at what the top and the bottom one have in common. Both are about the same thing: at the end, the customer is surprised by an amount they did not see coming. That is not a price problem, it is a timing problem. Put your shipping costs and fees on the product page and in the cart, not on the final screen.

The most concrete number from that same research is one you can count this afternoon. The average checkout shows 23.48 form elements, while an optimised flow can manage with roughly twelve to fourteen fields. Open your own checkout, count the input fields and checkboxes, and cut everything you do not actually use. First name and surname can go together. Company name can hide behind a link. Address can be completed from postcode and house number. The full checklist sits in checkout optimisation: the 32 points.

Why free delivery is not the best answer in the Netherlands

The reflex advice for falling conversion is free shipping. In the Netherlands that is demonstrably not the strongest move. In research among eight thousand European consumers, a thousand of them Dutch, 45.8% would rather choose a delivery option themselves than have delivery be free. That share is considerably higher in the Netherlands than in the surrounding countries.

The same measurement shows where that preference comes from. More than 81% prefer a specific time slot over getting it as fast as possible. Dutch shoppers do not necessarily want it faster, they want to know when. That is a design decision in your checkout, not a discount campaign.

The flip side is in there too. 24.2% will not order again from a store if the tracking information is wrong. One in four customers you worked hard to win does not come back because a status email lied about the delivery day. That is more expensive than any shipping discount.

And then the figure that puts the whole free-delivery discussion in perspective. On a fifty euro order, average willingness to pay for shipping is 4.47 euro. People are perfectly willing to pay for delivery. They just do not want to be surprised, and they want to be able to choose.

In practice that means three things. Show your delivery options and costs before the customer fills in their details. Give at least two real choices, for example a time slot at home and a pickup point. And make sure the delivery promise you make is what your customer sees back in their tracking email. Those three together are cheaper than free shipping and work better in the Netherlands.

What we see with brands that keep growing

We have been building brands and webshops for e-commerce owners since 2020, with 200+ reviews as proof that it works. Before Oase I started an e-commerce brand myself. That is why we do not read these figures as market news but as a description of somebody's monthly overview.

What stands out about the clients who get through this period: they sorted out their brand before they started pulling on volume, not the other way around. At Screenmate it started with positioning and identity, after which the webshop became the extension of that. At Castagnola the win sat in making a range recognisable inside a crowded category. In both cases the webshop was the final piece, not the starting point.

That is also how we split up the work. Branding sets down why somebody buys from you. Webshop development makes sure that reason survives from first click to confirmation email. If you are on Shopify, it is often the same subject at a different level: theme, templates and checkout, which we cover under Shopify.

What we do not do is sell a new visual identity to somebody with a leak in their checkout. That order is usually the wrong way round. Close the leak first, strengthen the story second, buy traffic third. Anyone working in reverse in this market is paying ad money to send people to a cart they walk away from anyway.

If you would do one thing today, do this. Open your own shop on your phone, as if you did not know yourself. Find a product, put it in your cart and go through to just before payment. Watch for two moments on the way: when do you first see what delivery costs, and how many times do you have to type something the store already knows. In most shops that come to us there is more loss in there than in their entire ad account. It costs nothing to look and it tells you within five minutes whether your problem sits at the front or at the back.

The thinning that Statistics Netherlands measures will continue over the coming quarters. That is no disaster for anyone with something to offer that does not fit in a price comparison tool. It is mostly a market getting more honest about who has a brand and who only had a store.

Frequently asked questions

How many webshops are left in the Netherlands? Statistics Netherlands counts 99,795 webshops and mail-order businesses in the third quarter of 2026. Six months earlier that number was still above one hundred thousand. Converted, more than 700 webshops are currently dropping out every month.

Why are so many webshops closing if spending has barely fallen? Because the contraction is on the supply side, not the demand side. Online spending fell by 1%, the number of purchases stayed flat and product spending actually grew. So roughly the same money is divided among fewer stores, and the one-person shops without a distinctive offer fall away first.

Can I still compete with foreign webshops? On price, barely. On everything around it, yes. The new customs duty of three euro per tariff line narrows the price gap a little, but not enough to build on. Deliver certainty about delivery, service and returns, and make sure people remember your name.

What is the fastest fix when my conversion drops? Count the fields in your checkout and show all costs before the customer fills in their details. Extra costs appearing late are the most-cited reason for abandoning. That is usually a one-day fix and costs you no ad budget.