Two out of three Belgians buy online

In 2014, about 7 million Belgians made a purchase over the Internet, or 64%. The number of online customers in the country has grown substantially since 2011, when there were 2 million customers, according to the fifth e-commerce survey by Belgian retail federation Comeos. For the study, Comeos gathered information about the online shopping habits of 1,500 respondents.

Comeos CEO Dominique Michel concludes from the survey that one in three Belgians are not yet buying online. "This may be because the Internet penetration rate in Belgium is just 84.7%, the lowest of all the neighbouring countries," he explains. "And there’s also still a long way to go before Belgium has a reliable payment platform provider and a point of contact for cyber security.”

According to Michel, consumers buy a product over the Internet because it saves time, not money. "Two out of three buy something via the Internet at least once every two months, with an average expenditure of €153 per month," he says.

Most online consumers are adolescents and people in their early forties (70%), and more men (68%) than women (61%) are e-consumers.

The products most often purchased are clothes and shoes, followed by books, tickets (for concerts, plane or railway tickets) and computers.