The Dutch market is lovely, but it’s also small, so most webshops here start eyeing Germany, Belgium and France almost before they’ve sold their hundredth parcel. Trouble is, shipping across a border isn’t just “posting a bit further.”
Suddenly there’s customs paperwork, VAT rules that shift from country to country, and returns that can cost more than the sale itself. Throw in customers who expect their order tomorrow, no matter where it’s coming from, and cross-border delivery quickly becomes its own headache.
So which delivery partners are actually built for this? Here’s a quick tour of the main players for Dutch webshops with international ambitions.
The delivery partners worth knowing
Not every carrier handles cross-border the same way. Some were designed for it from the start, while others are brilliant at home and go a bit wobbly the moment they cross a border.
- Spring GDS: Built for cross-border e-commerce from day one, rather than bolting it on later. It ships to 190+ destinations and handles the fiddly bits (customs, returns, and integrations with Shopify, Magento and WooCommerce) under one central contract instead of a separate deal per country. It’s also chasing net-zero emissions by 2040.
- DHL: The biggest network going, plus fulfilment and deep customs know-how, which makes it a safe bet for high-volume shops. Just keep an eye on the per-country tariffs, which vary a lot.
- UPS: Strongest when you’re shipping outside Europe, especially to the US and Asia. It clearly aims at the premium end of the market.
- PostNL: The familiar home-turf option and a comfy entry point for Belgium and Germany. Its reach thins out once you go beyond the neighbours.
- DPD: A solid choice within the EU, where parcels skip the heavier customs paperwork. Its prices and delivery times to Germany and France are often very competitive.
- FedEx: The intercontinental specialist, especially for North America and Asia. Pricey for smaller shops, but hard to beat for express orders.
- Trunkrs: A proudly Dutch outfit, founded in 2015 to make delivery friendlier: same-day, next-day and evening drop-offs (roughly 5pm to 10pm), with live driver tracking on a map. Order early enough in the day and it can land that same evening. Great inside the Netherlands and Flanders (Dutch-speaking Belgium), less so beyond it.
So why is cross-border shipping so complicated?
If you’ve only ever sent parcels the domestic way, it’s easy to underestimate the jump. Here’s where it usually gets tricky.
- Customs and VAT: Since the EU overhauled its VAT rules and brought in IOSS (the Import One-Stop Shop, which lets sellers handle EU import VAT through a single registration), you can’t just wing the tax side. In the Netherlands, VAT is called btw, and getting it wrong across several countries gets expensive fast. It’s about to get trickier, too, now that the EU is scrapping duty-free entry for cheap non-EU parcels and adding a per-item charge.
- Returns: A return from Munich isn’t the same as one from Maastricht. It’s slower, pricier and far more of a logistical puzzle, so it’s worth treating your returns process as part of the customer promise rather than an afterthought.
- Delivery expectations: A shopper in Germany expects the same speed a German webshop would offer. Can’t match it? They’ll happily buy local instead.
- CO2 impact: The further a parcel travels, the bigger its carbon footprint, which matters more and more to customers (and increasingly to regulators too).
In short: it’s not just whether you can ship internationally, but how well you pull it off.
The Dutch market is small, and that’s rather the point
The domestic market simply isn’t big enough for grand ambitions, so real growth means exports. Germany alone is an enormous opportunity, with France and Scandinavia close behind.
But your logistics need to be designed for that scale: transparent pricing, digital integrations, smooth customs, and a returns flow that doesn’t devour your margins. National carriers are great at what they do. Cross-border, though, is a different discipline entirely.
So which one should you actually pick?
There’s no single winner here. It genuinely depends on where you want to grow.
Spring GDS suits shops that want to scale internationally without solving a fresh logistics puzzle for every country. For those chasing the best cross-border e-commerce shipping, it offers a specialised model that pairs cross-border simplicity with real sustainability commitments.
DHL and UPS have the muscle for big volumes, DPD is dependable within Europe, and PostNL is your friend for the neighbours. Trunkrs owns same-day and next-day within the Netherlands and Flanders, while FedEx is the one to call when you’re heading off the continent entirely.
The real question isn’t “can we ship there?” It’s “can we ship there well: efficiently, at scale, and without breaking the promise we made to our customers?”
Run a webshop that’s dipped a toe into cross-border shipping? Tell us which carrier saved your sanity (or ruined your week) down in the comments.
