What We Know So Far: Early Findings from the Dutch Ecommerce CRM Benchmark

Nearly 70% of Dutch ecommerce brands say their biggest CRM challenge isn't strategy or content. It's getting data into the platform. Here's what we're finding so far.

Three months ago, we started asking Dutch ecommerce brands the harder questions about their CRM and email platforms. Not "what tool are you on?" but the more interesting parts that actually matter: Is it easy to use? Where do you get stuck? Would you recommend it? Are you planning to switch?

We made a deliberate choice to go wide across the market before focusing on Klaviyo, a leading CRM for ecommerce platforms, and wanted to have a balanced view of the market. We do have some Klaviyo responses already (word travels fast), but the dedicated Klaviyo outreach is still ahead of us.

Here, we'll cover:

• The platform analysis we've collected so far
• The headline finding: integration is a challenge
• Platform satisfaction
• Scale doesn't make it easier
• How your team structure affects your score
• Who's thinking about leaving
• What's still missing: the Klaviyo question

What you're reading is a genuinely mid-process snapshot: enough data to see patterns forming, not enough to call the final verdict on everything.

 

The platforms we've analyzed so far

We've had a great response from brands already (including some recognisable names in the Dutch region). Alongside a handful of smaller tools, 11 platforms have been included:

• Spotler
• Deployteq
• Mailchimp
• Bloomreach
• Emarsys
• Customer.io
• Voyado
• Reloadify
• Omnisend
• Braze
• Copernica

List sizes vary significantly, from sub-100K to well over a million subscribers. Roughly 34% of the sample is under 100K. Another 29% sits in the 100K-249K bracket. 3 brands are above a million contacts.

The ecommerce stack skews heavily toward custom/headless builds and Magento, together accounting for over 50% of respondents. Shopify is underrepresented relative to its market share, which reflects both who we've reached so far and the Dutch mid-market's infrastructure heritage.

Team structures range from solo founders doing everything themselves to large in-house CRM teams supported by agencies. That diversity is useful: it lets us see how team composition affects platform experience, not just the platforms in isolation.

 

The headline finding: it's an integration problem

If the data is saying one thing loudly, it's this: the biggest obstacle between Dutch ecommerce brands and effective CRM isn't strategy, content, or deliverability.

It's getting data into the platform in the first place.

38% of respondents name integration complexity as their single biggest bottleneck. Another 29% cite custom code requirements as their primary barrier. That's nearly 70% of the sample saying, in effect: the platform works, but connecting it correctly to the rest of our toolkit is hard. And that lack of data connection causes blind spots.

The root cause is structural. Dutch ecommerce runs disproportionately on Magento and bespoke headless builds, neither of which gives you a clean, pre-packaged connection to your email tool. Every data flow between the commerce platform and the CRM requires scoping, building, and maintaining. Product catalogs, customer histories, order events, real-time triggers, all of it needs a pipeline that someone has to build and keep alive.

50% of Magento respondents name integration complexity or custom code as their primary bottleneck. That's not a coincidence. It's a structural feature of operating on a platform with a complex data model and limited native integrations. Magento gives you flexibility. It doesn't give you ease.

But this isn't only a Magento story. Brands on other platforms, including Commerce Cloud, Deployteq, and Emarsys, describe variations of the same challenge.

One CRM manager at a major sports nutrition brand with over half a million subscribers described the problem plainly. They've been trying to get their product assortment into their email platform, displaying in the right language for the right person, inside an abandoned cart flow. They haven't cracked it yet. Not because the ambition is unreasonable, abandoned cart with personalized product recommendations is table-stakes CRM, but because their data pipeline isn't reliably handling multilingual product data at scale.

That's a solvable problem on some platforms. On others, it's been an open ticket for months.

 

Platform satisfaction: the honest numbers

We asked brands to rate their platform on ease of use (1-5) and NPS, a 0-10 recommendation score that gets at whether people would actually put their name to a tool in a conversation with a peer.

The overall average NPS across all platforms in the dataset: 6.4 out of 10. Not inspiring. It's the number you get from a market where most people are tolerating their tools rather than being genuinely delighted by them.

Higher end:

• Bloomreach: 10 NPS, 5/5 ease of use, one respondent, a specialist retailer with a sophisticated in-house team that has the technical depth to exploit what the platform can do
• Voyado: 8 NPS, 5/5 ease of use, satisfaction driven by genuine marketer self-service, not complexity
• Reloadify: 8 NPS, 4/5 ease of use
• Omnisend: 8 NPS, 4/5 ease of use

Lower end:

• Braze: 4/10 NPS, 2/5 ease of use
• Deployteq: 5.2 NPS, 2.8/5 ease of use
• Mailchimp: 5.5 NPS, 3.0/5 ease of use

These aren't numbers that suggest brands are about to switch en masse, switching costs are high. But they're not numbers that suggest loyalty either.

Spotler, the most-used platform in the dataset, lands in the middle: 6.5 NPS, 3.8/5 ease of use. Brands that have built their own templates and workflows over years are largely satisfied. Those trying to do more complex work (deep personalization, CDP-driven segmentation) are running into its limits.

 

Scale doesn't make it easier

The assumption is that bigger brands have bigger budgets, more technical resource, and therefore a better experience with their platforms.

The data doesn't support that.

Brands with over a million subscribers report the lowest average ease-of-use scores in the sample: 3.0 out of 5, below every other tier. The 250K-500K bracket also dips below average.

The explanation isn't that large brands have worse platforms. It's that large brands have harder problems. A national retailer with a million contacts, a headless commerce stack, and a need for personalized triggered communications across email and push is not going to find anything easy. The gap between what they need and what any platform delivers out-of-the-box is simply wider.

For brands in that 250K-500K zone, there's a particular pressure point: they've outgrown simple broadcast tools, but they don't yet have the internal resource to operationalize a genuinely enterprise-grade platform. They're in the gap. Several respondents in this bracket are actively evaluating alternatives.

 

How your team structure affects your score

In-house teams score their platforms an average of 6.5 NPS. The hybrid model, in-house team plus agency support, is close behind at 6.6. Purely agency-led setups score lower at 5.3 (though this is currently a small proportion of respondents).

The takeaway isn't that agencies are the issue. It's that platform satisfaction is highest when someone, whether in-house or at an agency, has deep, daily familiarity with the tool. The real friction shows up when platform limitations or technical issues turn into development problems, and the dev resources to fix them (internal or external) are limited or stretched thin. That bottleneck isn't about who's running the CRM. It's about how quickly blockers get resolved.

 

Who's thinking about leaving

34% of respondents say they're likely or very likely to switch platforms in the foreseeable future. The reasons cluster into three groups:

• Outgrown the tool. Mailchimp users in particular describe this: the platform works for what they're doing now, but the company is growing and they're not confident the tool will keep pace. It's not a complaint so much as a recognition that what got them here won't get them where they're going.
• Accumulated frustration. From brands on Deployteq, Emarsys, and Copernica in particular. The platforms aren't meeting their requirements, workarounds have piled up, and they've begun actively evaluating alternatives. Klaviyo and Bloomreach are mentioned by name as targets.
• A platform migration on the horizon. A pending move to Shopify. Several brands mention a Shopify migration on their roadmap, and when you change your ecommerce platform, your CRM stack is always part of that conversation. For some, it's already the trigger for evaluating new tools. For others, the CRM isn't part of that conversation yet, but as more Dutch brands move off Magento and PrestaShop, it will be.

 

What's still missing: the Klaviyo question

We want to be direct about the gap in this dataset, because it's significant.

Klaviyo is one of the most widely used email marketing platforms in ecommerce globally. In the Dutch market, its presence is growing, particularly among Shopify-native brands and those that have recently migrated to modern commerce infrastructure.

As a Klaviyo Elite agency, we made the call to sequence the research this way deliberately. The Dutch CRM market isn't just a Klaviyo story, and we didn't want the weight of Klaviyo responses to drown out the signal from platforms more specific to this market, like Deployteq, Spotler, and Reloadify, or from the enterprise tier that often gets overlooked in ecommerce marketing research.

What we can say so far: ease of use and strong automation are the most-cited reasons for recommending the platform. Almost all respondents so far are on Shopify, where Klaviyo's native integration is strongest. How it performs on other ecommerce stacks is something we'll be watching closely as more data comes in.

 

Frequently asked questions

 

How many brands have responded to the benchmark so far?

32 brands have completed or substantially completed the survey so far, covering 11 named platforms plus a handful of smaller tools. The sample spans list sizes from under 100K to over a million subscribers, giving us a broad cross-section of the Dutch ecommerce market.

 

Why isn't Klaviyo fully represented yet?

We deliberately sequenced the research to capture the broader Dutch CRM landscape first. Platforms like Spotler, Deployteq, and Reloadify are specific to this market and their signal would be drowned out by a large volume of Klaviyo responses. The dedicated Klaviyo outreach is the next phase, and we already have a small number of early Klaviyo responses in the dataset.

 

When will the full report be published?

The full report will be published once the Klaviyo outreach phase is complete. Respondents who take the survey receive early access to the report before public release. Take the survey here to secure your early access.

 

Is the data anonymous?

Yes, fully. All quotes and data points are attributed by approximate company size and sector only. No brand names, individual names, or identifying details are included in any published findings.

 

Want to take part in the survey?

The survey is open for a little while longer and we're actively looking for respondents on platforms we're currently light on. Particularly Klaviyo, but also ActiveCampaign, Brevo, Iterable, Copernica, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, and Omnisend as well as any brands on Deployteq, Spotler or Emarsys who haven't yet shared their experience.

Here's what to expect:

• Around ten minutes to complete
• Covers your platform setup, main pain points, integrations, and your honest take on whether you'd recommend your tool to a peer
• Early access to the full report on publication
• Full anonymity, quotes and data points are attributed by approximate size and sector only

We'll publish the final report once the Klaviyo outreach is complete.

Take the survey here

Interim findings from the Polaris Growth Dutch Ecommerce CRM Benchmark. Full report publishing 2026. Current sample size: 32 completed responses across 18 platforms.