2023-10-26 17:30:00
The Belgian association representing online merchants BeCommerce has grown this year, by joining forces with a competing organization, SafeShops.be. It is now Greet Decocker, Managing Partner of SafeShops.be, which will ensure the day-to-day management of the new federation. This merger will reinvigorate an entity which notably awards quality labels from which some 400 members already benefit. This label offers customers of these online sales platforms a guarantee of quality and trust.
The Belgian converted to e-commerce
This alliance was also an opportunity for the new federation to present the results of the “BeCommerce Market Monitor” for the first half of this year. This barometer shows that Belgians spent some 7.9 billion euros online over this period, an increase of 9.4% from one year to the next. Unsurprisingly, consumers’ preferred tool for online shopping is now the smartphone, used in 88% of cases. And in 98% of cases, purchases are made at home, and more often in the evening and during the week.
Winning services
For the first time, this barometer reveals a pre-eminence of spending on services, which increased by 20% from one year to the next to reach four billion euros. And 59% of total service purchases were made online.
Greet Decocker notes, in the presentation of the barometer, that Belgians “are increasingly resorting to online purchases for everyday services. For example, we are seeing a 35% increase in amounts spent on public transport.” She also notes that the insurance sector, in the process of digital transformation, has seen a 43% increase in transactions. The insurance sector games of chance, on the other hand, seems to be the only market segment in decline, due to the tightening of the legal framework. Furthermore, the study ensures that in “the top 3 products which have experienced the greatest increase compared to last year (in terms of value), we find sports and leisure (17.7%), followed by telecommunications (16.9%) and household appliances (8.8%).
Finally, according to another sectoral study, the large foreign online sales platforms (Amazon, eBay, etc.) have also made a place for themselves in the Belgian online commerce landscape. If Belgian SMEs (45%) use at least one digital channel for their sales, 32% of them use large commercial platforms. And, in this case, a quarter of the companies concerned claim to observe an increase of 23% in their sales on average.
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