Amazon has not yet been able to meet the high expectations following the launch of a Dutch webshop. It turns out that a mature market cannot be taken over just like that. And corona was both a curse and a blessing.
No big breakthrough
The timing seemed perfect when Amazon finally launched a fully-fledged Dutch-language webshop in March of this year, at the start of the corona crisis. In a booming e-commerce market, the internet giant was expected to cause a real landslide. How could local heroes such as Coolblue and bol.com have an answer to that immeasurable range, those super low prices and that smart ecosystem, with the cheap Prime membership? The retail apocalypse reached the Benelux, everyone seemed to agree.
But seven months later, little seems to have happened. According to figures from consultancy firm Maze-One, bol.com remains by far the most popular webshop in the Netherlands, followed by Coolblue, AliExpress and Wish. Amazon continues to dangle in fifth place. In Flanders, too, there is no sign of a major breakthrough. Benelux top executive Roeland Donker points to the corona crisis as an explanation for the slower start: “We could never have planned this,” he says to Business Insider. “It was a challenge to launch the business, but we are happy with where we are now.”
Longer delivery times
Observers point out that Amazon came to the Benelux with a serious backlog: the market was already served by strong local players with whom customers appear to be very satisfied. It is a big challenge to conquer a mature market as a newcomer, no matter how well-known your name and reputation are. “The Dutch webshops that were already on the market, both large and small, are doing just fine,” thinks Wijnand Jongen of Thuiswinkel.org. “In that sense, it is a challenge for Amazon to fight it out.”
Marketing professor Els Breugelmans of KU Leuven agrees: “Consumers are creatures of habit and the strong local players make it difficult to get a foothold,” she says to De Standaard. Moreover, Amazon does not have a distribution centre in the Netherlands: orders are delivered from Germany or France, which sometimes leads to longer delivery times, a major disadvantage.
“Still day one”
Can those local players sleep on both ears? Perhaps they should not be cheering too soon: Amazon has time and is building steadily. The range will grow to as many as 300 million products this year. The e-tailer is attracting more and more local sales partners: currently there are around 5,000 – far fewer than bol.com’s 34,000 partners, but the number is growing rapidly. With the inexpensive subscription and streaming service Amazon Prime, the company is seducing more and more customers. What’s more, Amazon turns out to be about 6% cheaper than bol.com.
Amazon is in no hurry and has very deep pockets. The company can afford to nibble at its competitors’ market share little by little. At the end of the day, retail is only a secondary activity for the group: they make money with other services. “As we always say at Amazon, it’s still day one,” says CEO Donker. “We have just started and are building for the future. This is about the long term.” In short: the race is far from over.