Online buyers are actually bargain hunters

In addition to the convenience of buying online and no longer having to leave your home, people mainly buy on the internet because it is cheaper than in the physical store. Most web shops do not have high costs such as renting an expensive retail property in an expensive shopping street. As a webshop, you don't have to hire store staff who have to speak to your customers in the store. No expensive promotional displays etc..

But many webshops have to deal with customer service costs, even if this will entail relatively less costs than staff in a physical store. It is actually the same story for the storage space. A building in an industrial area will be cheaper than a building in a shopping street. Marketing costs will probably be at a disadvantage for most webshops compared to the physical stores. But in general a webshop will have less fixed costs than a physical store.

This allows the product prices on the internet to fall. And because a webshop has to compete with the whole of the Netherlands or even the whole of Europe instead of a region, the prices will drop even further.

Is an online store worthwhile?

According to research by AUAS lecturer Jesse Weltevreden, 80% of all web shops in the Netherlands are certainly not profitable. 80% of all webshops have never achieved an average income from the earnings of a webshop. This is a high percentage and also indicates how difficult it is to start a well-functioning webshop. It all seems so simple, you create a webshop and place your products in it and then you can sit back and relax. It certainly doesn't work that way! A webshop is a full-time job and perhaps more than a full-time job.

A webshop is mainly about attracting many visitors to your website. This can be paid or free, but the cost of paid visitors will again be deducted from your profit margin, which is not that high at most webshops. Paid visitors are visitors who come to your website through advertisements. It all seems so beautiful, but a webshop is really hard work for your money. The big winner is the consumer, who benefits from the low margins!

shopping streets

Yet you see the shopping streets in most villages empty. The shopping streets will increasingly shift to the internet shopping streets. Internet purchases will continue to increase every year. Will the shopping streets disappear completely? We do not believe in that, but the number of physical stores will thin out. For example, Blokker, V&D and many more well-known retail chains are having a hard time. Consumer behavior has changed a lot in recent years. The well-known physical stores found out too late and have not been able to correct themselves. Very unfortunate, of course, because who doesn't go shopping every now and then? Time will tell.

Budget stores

Physical stores that are currently doing well are stores such as Action. They buy up large batches and sell them at real bargain prices that hardly anyone can match. An example are the envelopes that the Action sells. There is actually no web store that can charge the same price. Even we at Webshop-outlet.nl buy a lot of our envelopes at the Action. The quality is good and it is cheap. So cheap that our customers also benefit from it. It is also no wonder that these shops are springing up like mushrooms, every Dutch person likes cheap. Just like the action, Webshop-outlet.nl also buys up large parties in order to sell them again at outlet prices. Budget shops will always exist, and hopefully the shopping streets in the small towns and cities too.