Ding dong – there goes the doorbell. Again, you think. A parcel deliverer gives you a cardboard box or paper bag containing items ordered from an online shop. In fact, you no longer know exactly what you bought. While you were scrolling on your phone late at night, your thumb came a little too close to the buy button. And now you have another package richer, while you guiltily think about the pile of boxes that really really really have to be returned to the parcel point today. Whether the delivery person can also drop off some packages for the neighbors?
Dutch households received an average of 59 parcels per year delivered to their homes in 2024. Average, so if you think: this is not about me, then there are people who order much more. This does not include letterbox parcels, of which 71 million were delivered last year.
Since physical stores had to close their doors during the corona lockdowns, the purchasing behavior of Dutch people has changed. While a total of 282 million packages were delivered to consumers’ homes in 2019, that number had exploded to 504 million in 2021. After the pandemic, ordering activity decreased slightly, but delivery figures did not return to their previous levels.
Four out of five parcels were delivered to your home last year. This is relatively expensive for delivery services: if someone is not at home, the kilometers have been driven for nothing. They try to encourage recipients to choose alternatives: collection at a service point or in an unmanned parcel locker.
The number of takeaway machines is increasing rapidly: last year there were five times as many as in 2021. But this has not yet led to a major change in behavior. Choosing a parcel point or vending machine is often promoted as a more sustainable option. After all, the delivery person can deliver the packages anyway and does not have to drive the same order a second time. But this only applies if recipients then pick up their parcel on foot or by bicycle; if they go to the parcel point by car, they immediately cancel out the environmental benefit.
Most packages are delivered by PostNL’s orange-white vans, with DHL as its biggest competitor. In addition, a series of smaller players are active. For more than two out of three packages, delivery is not made by the companies themselves, but by subcontractors.
The figures do not include the own delivery services of web shops, while retailers are increasingly focusing on them. Coolblue has had its own fleet of bright blue vans for some time, and Bol has recently also experimented with its own delivery service. Amazon even has its own airline and recently announced an investment in its Dutch logistics. Vinted now also allows customers to send packages without first selling the contents via its own second-hand clothing platform.
In recent years, a tsunami of parcels from China has come to Europe, spurred by the popularity of the dirt-cheap web shops Shein and Temu. This influx is increasing, last September the total value of Chinese parcels was already higher this year than in the whole of 2024.
Attempts are being made at both European and national level to erect barriers in the form of parcel taxes and import duties. This is not going very well yet, there is a lot of frustration about European stagnation.
Every day, around 12 million parcels from China enter the EU, a quarter of which via Dutch (air)ports. This makes it impossible for Customs to properly check what comes in, which also means unsafe products end up in people’s homes.
The 3 million packages that arrive in Rotterdam and Schiphol do not all stay in the Netherlands. A large part has a final destination in other EU countries. Dutch people still place the vast majority of their orders at Dutch web shops, although the share of Chinese web shops is growing rapidly. “It’s about the speed of growth, the pace at which Chinese parties enter the market,” director Marlene ten Ham of trade organization Thuiswinkel.org said in March. NRC.
Online shopping has undeniably grown in recent years. At the same time, a lot is still purchased in physical stores. Less than 30 percent of purchases are made online. If you also include groceries – which people still mainly buy in traditional supermarkets – the share of online stores even drops to 11 percent.
Enough room for growth, many online retailers think. That parcel deliverer could become much busier in the coming years.
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