ECDB presents a new ranking of the Dutch ecommerce market, based on gross merchandise value per domain name. The top 10 includes four Dutch and three Chinese players. What is striking is that the latter are growing much faster. We were given a preview.
ECDB is a well-known publisher of ecommerce statistics, which compiles international rankings based on transaction data under the slogan “Follow the Money.” The German company has launched a new calculation method, that combines its own sales (first-party) and platform sales (third-party). This allows the rankings to provide an overview of gross merchandise value, including VAT.
Top 10 online stores in the Netherlands
Table of Contents
Below is the top 10 of Dutch spending per website:
| Ranking | Domain | Spending (GMV, euros) | Growth rating |
| 1 | Bol.com | 5.17 billion | Stagnation |
| 2 | Amazon.nl | 3.70 billion | Growth |
| 3 | Ah.nl | 1.74 billion | Growth |
| 4 | Coolblue.nl | 1.73 billion | Stagnation |
| 5 | Aliexpress.com | 1.72 billion | Strong growth |
| 6 | Zalando.nl | 1.18 billion | Strong growth |
| 7 | Shein.com | 1.14 billion | Strong growth |
| 8 | Temu.com | 1.07 billion | Strong growth |
| 9 | Vinted.nl | 811.2 million | Strong growth |
| 10 | Jumbo.com | 781.6 million | Stagnation |
The new list from ECDB is led by bol. Since 2016, the Utrecht-based company has been at the top of the Twinkle100, the well-known ranking of ecommerce companies in the Netherlands. To further illustrate bol’s dominant position in the country: in the three years before that, parent company Ahold (now Ahold Delhaize) was at the top of the list.
Amazon is gaining ground
According to ECDB, Dutch online shoppers spent just under 5.2 billion euros on bol.com last year. Amazon follows with a gap of almost 1.5 billion euros, but this only includes spending by Dutch consumers on Amazon.nl. Since Dutch consumers also shop on Amazon.de and Amazon.com, for example, the actual impact of the American company is greater, and the gap with bol is smaller.
That Amazon is growing quickly in the Netherlands, perhaps more so than previously thought, was already clear from an earlier ECDB ranking for 2023. According to the new list, Amazon.nl was more than twice as large in terms of trading volume as its closest competitors ah.nl, coolblue.nl, and aliexpress.com in 2024. They are very close to each other.
Amazon remains far ahead of Albert Heijn and Coolblue
To further illustrate the relationships at the top: combined, the domains of Albert Heijn, Coolblue, and AliExpress generate only slightly more volume than bol does on its own.
Growth trend
An interesting feature of the list is the growth rating that ECDB assigns to the top 10 players, shown in the last column of the table. There are three categories: stagnation, with growth of up to 5 percent; growth, with an increase of 5 to 15 percent; and finally strong growth, with a minimum increase in trading volume of 15 percent.
Of the four Dutch players on the list, only Albert Heijn managed to achieve “growth” last year, although its online subsidiary bol is at the top of the stagnation category (with a trading volume growth of 4.1 percent reported by Ahold Delhaize). However, Dutch spending on Amazon.nl, which is American-owned, grew by more than 5 percent according to ECDB.
The five other international players on the list achieved growth of at least 15 percent. These include Germany’s Zalando and Lithuania’s Vinted, which outperformed companies such as Wehkamp and MediaMarkt. Incidentally, app-only supermarket Picnic is not included in the ECDB ranking, which is a shame.
Chinese platforms
The list includes three domains of Chinese companies, of which AliExpress accounts for the highest trading volume in the Netherlands, according to ECDB. Shein and Temu follow, with volumes of over a billion euros, each, last year. This reflects the changing preferences of online shoppers in the Netherlands, who, according to ECDB, now spend more at foreign than with domestic players.
Temu and Shein generated more than 1 billion euros in sales in the Netherlands
