After a number of down years, digital product spending in the Netherlands is on the rise again. We are all buying more and more online and are expected to continue to do so, both from domestic and foreign players. The Netherlands is 'European e-commerce champion', with 86.7 percent of frequent online shoppers. There is more growth potential for entrepreneurs in other countries. With cross-border e-commerce, whether or not through marketplaces, there is and remains a world to win. The Webwinkel Vakdagen will pay a lot of attention to this.
AliExpress, Shein and Temu have shaken the tree considerably, but their rate of growth is levelling off. With new rules, Brussels is trying to rein in the platforms. The Chinese owners are responding by opening European warehouses and tying up local sales partners. This may provide a new growth impulse (cheap and fast). TikTok Shop, the international high-growth company in 2026, is also likely to enter the Dutch market.
Social commerce, whether live or not, has been big in Asia for years. In Europe it is now also gaining a firm foothold through the success of TikTok Shop. The platform manages to attract not only many users, but also sellers and influencers of all shapes and sizes. Thus, anyone can earn money from product demonstrations and recommendations and e-commerce becomes more accessible. Social commerce in the Netherlands is expected to grow by an average of about 20 percent in the coming years.
On Feb. 1, 2026, Amazon is lowering sales commissions in many categories. Separately, it is investing 1.4 billion euros to strengthen its position in the Netherlands. Amazon wants to make meters in logistics, including with its own Amazon Lockers. Chances are that Amazon will introduce its shopping platform Haul here, as well as its virtual shopping assistant Rufus. Serious competition for bol, which currently has almost ten times as many sellers in the Netherlands and Belgium. In our southern neighbors, Amazon will also be adding extra gas in the coming years.
Where Amazon works internationally with AI assistant Rufus, and Walmart with Sparky, Coolblue put a specialist assistant on the market last summer: Catherine, who helps with the search for MacBooks. By the end of 2025, Coolblue wants to have one hundred and fifty AI agents working for it, in different product categories. In 2026, more large online stores will launch one or more virtual assistants, with or without (brand) names. They will help shoppers with product searches, customer questions and comparisons.
Being found in search engines is and will remain important. In addition, being found in ChatGPT and other language models will be increasingly important in 2026, as people increasingly use them. For example, Jochanan Bax (Bax Music) expects their traffic share to rise from a few to dozens of percent in a year. Generative Engine Optimization, or GEO for short, is becoming part of every online marketer's job description.
The U.S. retail chain Target was the first to launch its own app within ChatGPT in November. It was followed by Instacart, which made it possible to order groceries without leaving ChatGPT. It raises the question of why retailers surrender to language models, where they let their customers search, select AND checkout. Wouldn't they do better to invest à la Coolblue in AI assistants to make their own platform more attractive? An important question for the new year.
Platform companies are increasingly offering sales partners marketing and logistics capabilities beyond their own walls. For example, adidas uses Amazon's Buy with Prime to drive sales on its own website; customers thus know they can have popular shoe models in their homes quickly. Through ZEOS, the Zalando Group enables partners to sell from a single stock internationally on Zalando, its own channels and many hundreds of other marketplaces. Thus, the tentacles of the major platforms are stretching further and further.
In e-commerce, the focus for a long time was on growth, and this was allowed to have a price. After corona, realism has returned and financing has become more difficult - borrowing money costs more money. To scale profitably, companies strive to understand the total cost of ownership. Total cost of ownership (TCO) is a key strategic KPI, in migrations and replatformings, as well as in more and more other decision-making processes on the road to profitability.
Consumers are getting more and more choice in delivery options. Web retailers, spurred on by carriers, are trying to control and spread demand by price differentiation (the faster the more expensive) and offering parcel lockers as an alternative. Carriers such as PostNL, DHL and DPD, but also Amazon and Vinted, for example, place parcel vending machines everywhere to turn receivers into collectors. Whether and at what price shoppers will get off the couch, however, remains to be seen.
Haste ultimately proved no good for flash delivery companies like Getir and Gorillas. Lately, companies have been coming up with new same-day delivery propositions to serve customers quickly, though no longer within 10 minutes. Amazon, meanwhile, delivers groceries on the day of order in thousands of U.S. locations. Shopify recently offered a link to Uber Direct, available to merchants in the U.S., Canada and France. MediaMarkt, represented on the Webwinkel Vakdagen stage, also continues to improve and accelerate its delivery proposition.
In 2026, composable commerce is increasingly delivering on its promise. By cleverly combining best-of-breed solutions, web shops are building flexible, scalable ecosystems that move better with customer expectations and market developments. Innovation is faster, platform dependence decreases and the total cost of ownership becomes more manageable. In this way, composable commerce offers not only technical freedom but also strategic advantage in a time of increasingly rapid change.