Amazon expands to Belgium, but shelves Amazon.be

At some point in the “coming months”, American e-commerce giant Amazon will (finally) open a local webshop for Belgium. However, due to an ongoing dispute, the shop will definitely not be called amazon.be.

Stubborn insurance company

Amazon has announced – remarkably enough from Luxembourg – that it will also cater for the Belgian online shopper: in a press release issued today, the company launched an appeal to sellers to register on sell.amazon.com.be. This does also mean, however, that Amazon has now explicitly admitted that the Belgian website will be called “amazon.com.be”. The e-commerce giant thus appears to have definitively bowed to the Antwerp-based insurance company of the same name, which has amazon.be as its website.

At present, Amazon has 21 local webshops worldwide, of which the French, German and Dutch branches are particularly successful in Belgium. The press release goes on to say that more than a thousand Belgian SMEs already make use of a foreign Amazon shop to sell their goods to international buyers.

Own distribution centre

Amazon has been delivering to Belgium for over twenty years, and the launch of amazon.fr in 2003 was the start of what is now one of the largest webshops in French-speaking Belgium. Dutch-speaking Belgians had to rely on the international version, until amazon.de set up a Dutch-language corner in 2016. Only since 2020 has there also been amazon.nl, but for the Belgian version, no agreement could be reached with the owner of amazon.be – definitively, it now appears.

The announcement of the local Belgian shop was not entirely unexpected, however: Amazon has already been busy expanding its Belgian operations for some time. In the autumn, for example, Amazon will be opening its own distribution centre in the port of Antwerp, which will account for around 250 jobs (at Amazon itself and at local courier services).