The Netherlands has more than 100,000 online stores. This number comes from the latest quarterly report from Statistics Netherlands. At least this number of companies have online sales as their main activity, but the number is increasing. The number of online stores with a wide assortment grew by 14 percent last year.
According to the latest quarterly data from Statistics Netherlands published in October, there are 99,990 companies registered in the “online retail” category. The actual number of online stores is higher, but this is the number of companies that consider online shopping as their main activity.
Three months earlier, in the quarterly update of July, the statistical office counted 97,905 companies in the same category. That’s a difference of 2,085. This means that since this summer, around 700 new online stores have been launched every month in the Netherlands.
It has more than doubled in five years
The number of companies with online sales as their core business has more than doubled compared to five years ago; at the end of 2019, Statistics Netherlands counted 46,430 companies in this category. Since the beginning of last year, the country has more online stores than brick-and-mortar stores.
However, it is interesting that total spending has not increased with the number of businesses in recent years. Online e-commerce sales rose 1 percent, according to the latest Market Monitor of e-commerce association Thuiswinkel.org. In short, people spent the same amount of money on products, while the amount of online shopping increased.
The number of online stores is constantly growing
During the coronavirus era, when online spending increased dramatically, the number of online stores grew rapidly and 2021 was a record year. However, the growth rate slowed down after the pandemic. Still, new e-commerce companies kept coming. To be precise, the difference between today and five years ago is 115 percent.
The number of companies increased by 115% in 5 years.
In its report, Statistics Netherlands counts companies operating under SBI code 4791 or companies that primarily sell products at a distance. This includes mail order companies and teleshopping providers, but their number is so low that Statistics Netherlands simply refers to all companies as “online shops”.
The difference compared to the number in the Chamber of Commerce
The Dutch Chamber of Commerce has its own number of businesses in the country. There are currently 109,323 companies in the online retail category. An important difference is that Statistics Netherlands classifies companies by main activity or sector (SBI classification), while the Chamber of Commerce includes both main and secondary branches of a company in the commercial register.
“We connect the registrations of the Chamber of Commerce, i.e. legal entities, to companies on the basis of control relationships,” a CBS spokesperson clarified when asked. “So a company according to Statistics Netherlands is a tree structure of Chamber of Commerce registrations.” For the record.
Product categories
According to Statistics Netherlands, 22,985 online stores sold clothes last month, or 23 percent of the total number of businesses. Clothing is therefore the most popular category, followed by general merchandise online stores (20,325 companies, or 20.3 percent) and home and garden online stores (18,250, or 18.3 percent).
Clothing is the most popular online product category
This year, the number of online stores with a general assortment grew the most in absolute and relative terms. Since the measurement in the first quarter, 2,465 entrepreneurs have actually increased. That’s an increase of 14 percent.