One year of Amazon in Belgium: 1,200 partners, 5 million products

One year after its launch, Amazon‘s Belgian webshop is already selling products from 1,200 local businesses. The retailer still sees potential, as more than half of the 1.2 million Belgian SMEs are not yet selling online.

Difficult timing

Exactly one year ago, Amazon – finally – launched a local webshop in Belgium. The American e-commerce giant is already working with 1,200 Belgian companies, director Eva Faict told Belgian newspaper De Tijd. They sold a total of five million products via Amazon last year.

That still puts the retailer well behind its local rival Bol(.com), which hosts more than 6,000 Belgian sales partners on its platform. It is difficult to establish whether the Ahold Delhaize subsidiary is losing partners to Amazon: many sellers are active on both platforms.

Amazon can build on its brand recognition and global scale, but it came to Belgium at a time when the e-commerce market was starting to stagnate. Nevertheless, the company still sees great potential. A report by research firm Kantar shows that 55 % of Belgium’s 1.2 million SMEs are not yet digitally active. “Too many Belgian companies give up because they think it is too complex to launch their business online”, Faict stated.