Growing a webshop in 2026 means competing with retail chains
If you want to grow your webshop, your biggest competitor is no longer the webshop next to you. It is the retail chain that added online selling on the side. In June 2026 online revenue was 7.5 percent higher than a year earlier, but that growth is unevenly spread. For retailers where internet sales are a secondary activity, online revenue grew by almost 10 percent. For businesses that sell online only, it stalled at almost 6 percent.
That gap of more than four percentage points is about your peer group. All of Dutch retail grew 2.9 percent in revenue and 2.5 percent in volume that month, so the market itself is moving. The pure webshop simply takes a smaller share of it.
The explanation is uncomfortable and simple. A chain with physical stores built name recognition before a single visitor landed on the site. People know the logo from the motorway, they once returned something there, they trust it. That store has nothing left to prove online. You do. Your entire company sits in a product page one and a half screen heights tall on a phone.
Everything a retail chain brings in trust and recognition has to be organised on your product page. That is doable, and it is mostly design work.
Why does a retailer with stores grow faster online than your webshop?
Because it brings two things no advertising budget can buy: recognition and the benefit of the doubt. When someone knows a brand from the high street, the product page no longer has to remove that doubt. The visitor stepped over the threshold before the site even loaded.
A pure webshop starts every session at zero. The visitor arrives through an ad or a search result, does not know the brand, and decides within seconds whether this is a serious company. Everything you have to answer that question sits on one page: the imagery, the copy, the price, the delivery promise and the way the whole thing looks.
On top of that, multichannel retailers can carry their online channel with margins and volumes from the stores. They can price sharper online, offer free returns and absorb shipping costs, because the channel does not have to be a standalone business. For you, it is a standalone business.
Consumer electronics posted the strongest online rise in June at 9.0 percent. Statistics Netherlands does not split that category into pure webshops and chains, so it is not proof. It is a category where players with both a store and a webshop are large.
The conclusion is not that you should compete on price. That fight you lose by definition against a party with more volume. The conclusion is that you have to compete on the one point where you stand on equal footing: the quality of the moment someone looks at your product.
Why do more orders leave you with less revenue?
The second movement under the market makes it sharper. In the first quarter of 2026 Dutch consumers made over 85 million online purchases, two percent more than a year earlier, while spending in that same quarter fell six percent to nearly 9 billion euros. More orders, smaller amounts per order.
Across all of 2025 the picture was the same: 35.7 billion euros online, one percent below the year before, spread over 347 million transactions that actually went up. Average order value has been sliding for more than a year.
For a webshop that means two things at once. You get more chances, because people order more often. And every chance is worth less, because they order smaller. Anyone who wants to keep revenue flat has to win more orders or make the order bigger. Both start at the product page.
| What the market is doing | What it means for your webshop |
|---|---|
| More purchases, lower amounts | Work on bundles, sets and logical add-ons |
| Online growth sits with multichannel players | Build recognition that does not come from a building |
| Almost half of purchases on a phone | Design the product page for a small screen first |
| Price pressure across the board | Sell on understanding of the product, not on discount |
Take the third row. The smartphone share now sits at 44 percent of all online purchases. For almost half of your orders the decision falls on a screen that fits one image and two lines of copy.
What a multichannel retailer has that you have to build
Put the two company types side by side and the difference is not technical. It is accumulated trust, and it can be rebuilt without renting a building.
| What the chain has | Where you build the equivalent |
|---|---|
| A recognisable logo on the street | Consistent brand identity across shop, marketplace and packaging |
| Holding the product in your hands | Imagery that shows scale, material and use |
| A staff member answering questions | A product page that pre-empts the three most common questions |
| Exchanges at the counter | A return promise visible before checkout |
| A till where you simply pay | A checkout without forced registration |
The left column cannot be caught up with a bigger media budget. The right column can, and it is mostly design work.
The order matters. Start with brand identity, because it determines how every other element looks. A webshop whose ad, product photo and delivered box look like three different companies builds no recognition. Every euro of ad budget then starts again at zero.
Imagery comes next. On a small screen the first photo does the work that touch does in a store. Scale, material and use should be visible there, not buried in a description nobody expands. That is why we treat product photography as conversion work rather than decoration.
Only then comes the technology. A faster site helps, but a fast site without a brand still sells nothing.
Where does your revenue leak in the checkout?
Most shops look for the leak in their traffic. It sits in the checkout. Across dozens of studies Baymard measures average cart abandonment of nearly 70 percent. Part of that is normal behaviour, because people compare and save for later. But a large part is solvable design work.
| Reason for abandoning | Share | What you do about it |
|---|---|---|
| Being forced to create an account | 18 percent | Guest checkout as default, account offered afterwards |
| Checkout too long or too complicated | 17 percent | Cut fields, one screen, autocomplete the address |
| Unexpected costs at the end | largest single reason | Show shipping cost and delivery time on the product page |
The first two are measured by Baymard as separate abandonment reasons and both are fixable in your shop system without touching code. The third is not a technical question but a choice: dare to be early about the total price.
For a pure webshop these three weigh heavier than for a chain. Someone who knows the brand accepts a messy checkout more easily, because they brought trust with them. For you, the checkout is the first moment the visitor has to decide whether to hand over their details, and every extra field gives them a reason to hesitate.
We worked this out in a separate checklist on what goes wrong in the checkout, including the points you can walk through yourself. Do that before you buy more traffic. Pushing more visitors through a leaking checkout is the most expensive way to enlarge a problem.
How we grow a webshop without physical stores
We have done this for six years, exclusively for e-commerce, and the pattern is nearly always the same. There is a product that works, there is revenue, and there is no brand carrying that product at the moment someone sees it for the first time.
So we never start with a new website. First the question of what the brand promises, and whether the ad, the product page and the box all three deliver on it. For Drivv and Maoo that meant locking the identity first and building the imagery and the shop after, so that ads, product page and packaging show the same company.
The product page follows, because that is where the money falls. Imagery that explains the product, a title that matches search intent, and a structure that reads in one movement on a phone. For brands that also sell on marketplaces the principle is identical, only the space is smaller and the competition is literally one swipe away.
The shop itself comes last. We build it in Shopify or as a custom website, depending on what the brand needs, but the order is fixed. Technology follows brand, not the other way around. A webshop that does not convert usually has no technical problem, but a product page that makes nothing clear in three seconds.
That is also why we do not separate branding from execution. A brand book sitting in a drawer while the product photos come from three different photographers changes nothing about your growth.
What you can do this month
You do not have to rebuild to close the gap. Four actions deliver the most, in this order.
Week one: look at your own product page on a phone. Not on your laptop. Pick up your phone, search for your best-selling product through Google, and judge what you see in the first screen height. Does someone who does not know your brand understand within three seconds what this product is, how big it is and why it beats the alternative? If not, that is your biggest win.
Week two: remove the forced account from your checkout. Make guest checkout the default and offer the account afterwards. This is usually a setting, not development work, and it hits one of the largest single abandonment reasons.
Week three: put shipping cost and delivery time on the product page. Not in a collapsed panel and not only in the final step. Unexpected costs at the end are the main reason a filled cart stays where it is.
Week four: line up your three channels. Ad, product page and packaging. Do they look like they come from the same company? If not, you are paying every month for recognition you never accumulate. That is the part a chain with stores gets for free, and the only part where you can genuinely catch up.
Do these four things and you are still not a chain. You just start every session with less of a deficit in front of a visitor who does not know your brand. The gap between almost 6 and almost 10 percent does not close here. You do get more out of the traffic you already pay for.
Frequently asked questions
Why is my webshop growing slower than the market? Because the growth is unevenly spread. Retailers selling online as a side activity grew almost 10 percent in June 2026, pure online sellers almost 6 percent. That gap is not about the product. It is about the recognition and trust a physical chain already brings to the screen.
What can a webshop without stores do about that gap? Everything a physical store does for recognition and trust has to be organised on your product page. Concretely: a brand that stays consistent across every channel, imagery that explains the product without a caption, and a checkout without surprises.
Is Dutch e-commerce still growing? In volume yes, in euros no. In the first quarter of 2026 Dutch consumers made over 85 million online purchases, two percent more than a year earlier, while spending fell six percent. More orders, smaller amounts.
Where does a webshop lose the most revenue? In the checkout. Baymard measures average cart abandonment of nearly 70 percent, with a forced account and a checkout that is too long among the largest single reasons to abandon.
How long before brand work pays off in a webshop? In our projects, brand work shows up in the numbers after roughly a quarter. The fastest wins sit in the product page and the checkout, and you see those within weeks. Recognition and repeat customers build slower, but they carry every campaign you run after that.
