LOGISTICS Management 32

Next month, on 1 and 2 December to be precise, Kortrijk Xpo will be the setting for the very first trade fair 'E-commerce'. The new initiative, which is partly supported by Unizo, shows that Belgian retailers are increasingly beginning to see the benefits of multichannel retailing. According to research by the Belgian trade federation Comeos, online shoppers now spend around 2,000 euros a year on the World Wide Web. And now that the over-60s have also found their way to the web shop (55 percent, 13 percent more than last year), the pie will only get bigger. An important detail: half of all online consumers indicate that they prefer to shop at a Belgian e-tailer. The growing interest in e-commerce and everything that goes with it (such as logistics, of course) has therefore come none too soon. What the arrival of the new trade fair platform also shows is that we are catching up with our neighbouring countries. Anyone who has ever walked over the heads at the Webwinkel Vakdagen in Utrecht knows what we are talking about: a salon about e-commerce attracts about as many people as an IKEA on a drizzly Sunday afternoon. Inspired by the success of the Webwinkel Vakdagen, Kortrijk Xpo and Unizo are presenting a similar concept, in which all kinds of service providers come to introduce themselves to the Belgian market: developers of webshops and payment systems, e-marketers, but also a significant number of logistics service providers who want to prove that they have now fully mastered the art of e-fulfillment. In short: high time to get out from behind that computer screen again.