Ecommerce website accessibility in Belgium, measured on 3,458 shops

In November 2026 we checked the home pages of 3,458 Belgian webshops. Only 97 of them, 2.8%, link to an accessibility statement. Another 117 still link to the EU's ODR dispute platform, which shut down in July 2025, and 40 show the withdrawal button that became mandatory in Belgium on 14 August 2026. Return information appears on roughly one in three.

Three rules that changed for online shops

The European Accessibility Act reached Belgian e-commerce on 28 June 2025. From that date a shop selling to consumers has to work with a keyboard, a screen reader and zoom, and has to explain how it meets the requirements. If you want to know whether your own site is in scope, start with does the European Accessibility Act apply to my website. How regulators in the Netherlands and France handled the first year is covered in the EU accessibility law, one year on.

Two other changes landed in the same window: the EU closed its online dispute resolution platform, and a withdrawal button became mandatory. We checked what a visitor can find on the home page for each, plus two older duties as a baseline.

Just 47 shops, 1.4%, get all three accessibility and returns items right on the home page: a statement link, return information and no leftover ODR link. Four shops run an overlay, a plug-in that promises one-click accessibility.

Why a missing link is not a verdict

A shop without a statement link is not automatically out of line, for two reasons.

First, small firms get time. Micro-enterprises, meaning fewer than 10 staff and annual turnover or balance sheet of at most 2 million euro, are outside the Belgian requirements until 28 June 2030, after which the rules apply to them as well. A website does not reveal headcount or turnover, so we cannot separate them out and we count all 3,458 shops.

Second, location. The directive asks for the accessibility information in the general terms and conditions or an equivalent document, not on a dedicated page. A shop may have covered it there. What we can say is that on 97.2% of the home pages we checked, we did not find it.

In Belgium the Economic Inspection of the economy ministry enforces the rules, with fines of up to 200,000 euro or 6% of annual turnover. Consumers can file complaints through ConsumerConnect, the government reporting point.

Where the 3,458 shops come from

The starting list holds 31,123 Belgian local businesses with their own website, across seven sectors and the ten provinces plus Brussels. 23,676 sites worked; the others no longer existed, redirected to another domain or returned an error. 532 blocked us with a bot check, which we left alone. We also set aside 1,703 sites that load their text through JavaScript, since a plain fetch shows almost nothing to read on those.

Of the 21,973 sites left, 15.7% sell online with a cart or order button on their own domain. Catalogue sites and sites that only point to a marketplace do not count. It is the same list we used for the state of Belgian business websites, so the two studies line up.

Retail sells online, hospitality much less

Retail accounts for 61% of all webshops and leads on almost every measure: 39.0% explain returns on the home page, against 11.7% in hospitality, where shops often sell vouchers, meals or gift boxes.

Healthcare stands out for the wrong reason. One in three healthcare shops still links to the ODR platform. 62 of those 63 run on Magento, which points to one shared design used by many shops at once; fixing that design would remove the link everywhere.

Brussels and Antwerp lead on shop share

Almost one in five local businesses in Brussels, Antwerp and East Flanders sells online, against about one in eight in West Flanders, Limburg and Liège. Statement links are rare everywhere, between 1.4% and 4.4%, so the provinces are roughly level there. Return information differs more: shops in Namur, Liège and Brussels show it more often than shops in Limburg and Flemish Brabant. This count does not tell us why.

Bancontact first, Wero arriving

887 shops, one in four, show payment logos on the home page. Among them Bancontact leads at 77.1%, ahead of the card schemes.

Wero already shows up on 163 shops, 155 of them as the combined iDEAL and Wero logo. For a shop selling across borders, payment methods in Europe lists what buyers expect per country, and iDEAL in your webshop covers the Dutch side.

What a browser test adds

A statement link says nothing about the shop itself, so we opened 471 webshops in a mobile browser and ran axe-core against the WCAG rules a machine can test. Weighted by system, 92.4% of home pages had at least one serious or critical issue, and 92.0% of product pages.

For 173 of those shops we could reach a product page from the home page. The others had no product link on the home page, or the server refused the request.

Product pages stand out on form fields. That is where a customer picks a size or a quantity, and on 17.8% of them at least one field had no label, against 4.6% of home pages. A screen reader then announces little more than "edit text".

In October we ran the same test on the home pages of 427 ordinary Belgian business sites: 92.7% had at least one serious or critical issue, with low contrast the top problem at 71.6%. Shops land at 92.4%, the same level, and low contrast tops the list here too at 68.6%. On this test a webshop is no better built than an ordinary business site. Automated tests miss a lot; keyboard and screen reader checks still need a person. For a first scan of one page, use the accessibility checker.

Shops versus ordinary business sites

You might expect a business that earns its money online to put more care into its site. On what we could measure statically, the gap is small. Shops link a statement slightly more often (2.8% against 1.9% for the 18,515 other sites), block pinch zoom slightly less often (13.8% against 15.2%) and leave out alt text just as often (23.4% against 25.2%).

Results differ widely by system, which reflects theme and build choices more than the system itself. Across 1,121 WooCommerce home pages we found no statement link at all, while 62 of the 351 non-shop sites that do link one run on WordPress. On Shopify 59.6% show payment methods on the home page, on WooCommerce 14.2%. The CSV has every figure per system, and Shopify or WooCommerce compares the two in depth.

Fixes that take an afternoon

Most of the shops we measured can move a long way quickly:

• Publish a statement and link itSay what works, what does not yet, and how a customer reaches you when something fails. Our accessibility statement template gives you the structure; a footer link next to your terms makes it findable.
• Remove the ODR linkThe platform is gone, and a click now lands on a relocation notice from the European Commission.
• Add the withdrawal functionSince 14 August 2026 a customer in Belgium must be able to withdraw through a clearly visible function for the whole withdrawal period. The EU withdrawal button explains the rule and the withdrawal button in Shopify and WooCommerce shows how to build it.
• Allow zoom and fill in alt textTwo settings that one shop in seven and one in four still get wrong, and both help ecommerce SEO too.

For the full list of what a Belgian shop has to publish, from company number to cookies, see ecommerce legal requirements.

Reading the numbers

These counts are a snapshot of early November 2026, taken from the home page. They are a floor: a shop can keep its statement, return policy or withdrawal function on another page. The rule asks for a withdrawal function that is prominently displayed on the online interface and easily accessible (Article 11a of Directive 2011/83). Whether a function reachable only after login is enough, the text does not say, and a guest without an account cannot reach it. So the 40 shops where we saw it measure visibility, not compliance. A day later we read up to four pages per shop and counted 112 functions without login across 2,824 webshops outside hospitality, as set out in our research on the withdrawal button in Belgium.

You are welcome to reuse the figures with VBS as the source; the CSV at the top has them by sector, province, system and axe rule. For a comparable count on load times, see website speed in Belgium.

Build it right from day one

Accessibility is cheaper to build in than to bolt on. When we handle your webshop development, accessibility, the withdrawal function and a statement are part of the first release, so 2030 needs no rebuild. A website starts at 1,500 euro. Want to know where your current shop stands? Book a call.