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Belgium

Ecommerce website development for Belgian businesses

Ecommerce development for Belgian businesses starts with two decisions most stores get wrong: whether Bancontact is in the checkout, and whether the site is genuinely bilingual. A Belgian shopper without Bancontact often leaves, and a Dutch-only site closes off Wallonia. We build remotely from Rajkot and hold no Belgian office.

How do you work with Belgian clients?

We hold no Belgian office.

Work runs from our studio in Rajkot on a shared board you can open at any time, with decisions written down the day they are made and scope changes priced before they are built. What is specific to Belgium is that language is structural rather than cosmetic. A Belgian store usually needs Dutch and French with equal standing, sometimes German as well, and that is a decision about the content model and the URL structure rather than a translation task bolted on at the end. Retrofitting a second language into a store built for one means new URLs for every product and category, new metadata, and a redirect map — which is why we ask about it in the first conversation rather than the fifth. We build the structure: parallel content fields, language-specific URLs, hreflang that actually resolves, and a language switch that keeps the customer on the page they were reading rather than dumping them on a home page. The words themselves come from you or a translator you trust, because a French page that reads as translated Dutch is a commercial problem we cannot fix with markup. Invoicing is in euro. Contracts are governed by the laws of India, stated plainly in our terms and worth raising with your adviser before signing.

What we build

Four services, delivered the same way wherever you are: Shopify stores, WooCommerce stores, the interface design that decides whether either converts, and the automation that removes manual work from running them.

Which platforms dominate in Belgium?

Our observation, not sourced data

What we see in the Belgian market, stated as our observation rather than as data we can cite: Shopify dominates new launches and WooCommerce holds the WordPress-grown installed base, much as in the Netherlands. The distinctly Belgian pattern is that projects arrive with a language decision already half-made and rarely fully thought through — a Dutch site with a French page bolted on, or a bilingual site whose two halves have drifted apart because nobody owns the second language. That drift, rather than the platform, is what we usually spend the first phase fixing.
  • Shopify
  • WooCommerce
  • WordPress

What does a Belgian store actually have to handle?

Every layer below is something a store selling in Belgium has to get right, and most of them are decided before a line of code is written. Thresholds and rates are deliberately not quoted here — they change, and the primary sources are linked further down.

What a store selling in Belgium typically needs at each layer.
LayerWhat Belgian stores usually need
CurrencyEuro, with prices shown inclusive of VAT to consumers
Payment methodsBancontact first, then cards, Apple Pay, Google Pay and PayPal
Buy now, pay laterKlarna is the option most often requested by name
Shipping carriersbpost, PostNL, DPD, GLS; pickup points are widely used
Tax handlingBelgian VAT, with one-stop-shop reporting for EU distance sales
LanguagesDutch and French with equal standing, and German in the eastern cantons
Data protectionGDPR, regulated by the Data Protection Authority
Consumer rightsA fourteen-day withdrawal right on most distance sales

Cities we cover in Belgium

Each city page describes what commerce actually looks like there rather than repeating this one. If your city is not listed, the service is identical — we simply have not written a page worth publishing about it yet.

Data and consumer rules

Primary sources

A Belgian store carries the standard EU pair with a language dimension running through both. GDPR governs what you collect and what a customer can require you to erase, with the Belgian Data Protection Authority as regulator. Consumer law gives a fourteen-day withdrawal right on most distance sales, stated before purchase rather than buried in a policy. The Belgian complication is that both of these have to be satisfied in the language the customer is using — a consent notice or a set of withdrawal terms that exist only in Dutch are not much use to a customer reading the French site, and a bilingual store that keeps its legal pages in one language has a gap exactly where it can least afford one. We build so that every page with an obligation attached exists in every language the store serves. Which obligations apply to your business is a question for your own adviser, and nothing here is legal advice.

Nothing on this page is legal or tax advice.

Where Belgian businesses sell next

These are the markets clients in Belgium most often ask about once the first store is trading. Each has its own payment habits, carriers and regulator, and a store built for one does not automatically work in the next. Every other market we cover is listed underneath.

Belgian questions we are asked

5 questions specific to working with us from Belgium, including the one most agencies avoid: whether anybody at this studio is actually in the country.

Do you have a Belgian office?

No. We work from Rajkot, India, and this page says so rather than implying a Brussels address. What you get is a named contact who stays with the account, a shared board you can open at any time, and answers within one business day. If somebody physically present is a requirement, we do not meet it.

How important is Bancontact really?

In our experience it is the difference between a checkout Belgian shoppers complete and one they abandon. It is the domestic method most people reach for by default, and a store offering only international cards is asking every customer to make an unfamiliar choice at the least forgiving moment of the journey.

Do we need German as well as Dutch and French?

That depends entirely on whether you sell into the eastern cantons in any volume, and it is your commercial call rather than ours. What we would avoid is adding a third language later without planning for it, because each language multiplies the URLs, the metadata and the content anybody has to keep current.

Can one store serve both language communities?

Yes, and it should. Two separate sites double the maintenance and drift apart within a year, which is the failure we see most often. One store with parallel content fields, language-specific URLs and a switch that keeps the reader in place is considerably less work to run and easier to keep honest.

What does hreflang actually need to do here?

Point each language version at the others, reciprocally, at the level of the individual page rather than the site. Most bilingual Belgian stores we inherit have hreflang on the home page and nowhere else, which tells a search engine almost nothing about the product pages that are meant to rank.

Get in touch

Building or replatforming a store in Belgium?

Tell us what you are building and we will come back within one business day.

Invoiced in
EUR
City pages
8
Office in Belgium
None