Holiday shopping sales of online retailer Bol.com 2015-2019

E-commerce sales during the 2019 holiday season of Bol.com (a web shop popular in the Netherlands and Belgium) are forecast to increase over 25 percent compared to 2018. Bol.com is a Dutch-language variant of Amazon, in the sense that the website is a marketplace and sales can either come from the retailer itself, third parties or from a second-hand goods section. It was the biggest online retailer of the Netherlands (with Amazon itself being the sixth largest) in 2018 and one of the most visited web shops by Belgian customers (behind the French website of Amazon) in 2017.

Some important notes on these numbers…

In the Netherlands and Belgium, the holiday season consists of two events: Saint Nicholas (in Dutch: Sinterklaas), on December 5th, and Christmas. The source does not mention whether it included Black Friday purchases or purchases on Cyber Monday or Singles Day in its calculations. These events normally kick off the holiday season in the United States or other countries. More crucially, however, the source did not mention whether the Bol.com sales are only for the Netherlands, Belgium, or both.

E-commerce boosts early in the season, but from where?

The Sinterklaas event is a big tradition in the two countries, for some arguably even more important than Christmas for online shopping. The online shopping revenue in the weeks leading up to Saint Nicholas of 2018 were, on average, 28 percent higher than during a regular week (311 million euros in a week during that time, compared to 243 million in a normal week). It is noticeable, however, that Singles Day, Black Friday and Cyber Monday all happen in the time leading up to the Saint Nicholas event. This might have significant consequences for numbers that show the effect of Saint Nicholas in Belgium and the Netherlands. In Belgium, for example, nine out of ten retailers were familiar with the concept of Black Friday in 2018.