Products that are available on both Dutch web shops and Amazon.de, are cheaper at Amazon in about half the cases. Not only do Dutch stores compete with Amazon.de, which ships to the Netherlands, but there are also rumours that Amazon.nl and Amazon.be will soon become more active.
Name brands cheaper
Comparison website Vergelijk.nl analysed a series of products and concluded that Coolblue, bol.com and other Dutch web shops are more expensive than Amazon about fifty percent of the time.
“Our comparison brought to light that mostly name brands come to the forefront. A Fitbit charge 2, a Samsung Galaxy Tab A or an Oral-B 6700 cross are all cheaper at Amazon. A Senseo quadrante, a Philips air fryer or a Philips 4000 LED tv are cheaper at Coolblue and the Televisiewinkel respectively”, founder of Vergelijk.nl, Ben Kerkhof, told De Telegraaf. Vergelijk.nl only compared prices for twenty products out of the top 10 product categories, a very selective analysis.
These findings are no major problem for the local retailers just yet, but there are rumours that Amazon wants to become more active in the Netherlands and Belgium.
Pressure on local players
Amazon is already active in Belgium and the Netherlands, but only in very limited fashion. It recently launched Amazon Prime through Amazon.de (and Amazon.fr for Wallonia), but it is allegedly planning to launch about twenty product categories on Amazon.be and Amazon.nl later this year.
If the company were to launch an actual web shop in both Belgium and the Netherlands, it could cause a major shift in the market. The Dutch web shops in particular would need to prepare, because they stand to lose market share both in Belgium and the Netherlands. Belgian web shops would need to deal with another enormous foreign competitor, after they already had to deal with the Dutch web shop invasion.
