Leading online marketplaces in Belgium 2023, based on visit share

In December 2023, bol.com was the most visited online marketplace in Belgium, accounting for approximately 21 percent of desktop visits to sites in this category. Coming in second place was amazon.fr, responsible for nearly ten percent of traffic, while aliexpress.com ranked third with 9.67 percent of marketplace visits. Interestingly, all companies in Belgium’s top five are foreign online marketplaces. Indeed, survey data reveals that two-thirds of Belgian consumers buy from foreign sellers.

Cross-border shopping

The Belgian e-commerce climate is quite unique. Partly due to its small size and multi-lingual division, e-commerce companies from neighboring countries are more popular than Belgian companies. Indeed, in 2022, 35 percent of Belgian cross-border purchases came from the Netherlands, where Bol.com is headquartered. A further 23 percent of transactions were conducted on French platforms, represented in the present statistic by Amazon France.

Belgian online shopping preferences

Belgian consumers are active on the internet, but still prefer to shop mostly in-store. A 2023 survey revealed that 36 percent of Belgians prefer in-store shopping, whereas 26 percent opt for e-commerce. Zooming in on Belgian e-commerce attitudes, it becomes apparent that consumers from Flanders, Wallonia, and Brussels are no impulse buyers. Product research and reading customer reviews are the two most popular e-commerce activities in Belgium.