Arjan van Oosterhout has been contributing to Ecommerce News Europe since the spring of 2023. He writes news articles for the website on a freelance basis.
Arjan is an experienced journalist in the field of ecommerce. After his student days in Utrecht, he began his career in 2004 at the South African newspaper, the Cape Argus, in Cape Town. Upon his return to the Netherlands, Arjan transitioned into trade journalism. He worked for MarketingTribune and, since 2008, served as an editor and later editor-in-chief of Twinkle, a well-known Dutch trade publication on digital commerce. He was also closely involved with the Twinkle100, an annual study of the largest online retailers in the Netherlands.
Since 2020, Arjan has been an independent entrepreneur. Under the company name Bureau AvO, he works for various journalistic and commercial clients, contributing to articles, magazines, books, and conferences, always at the intersection of content and commerce.
Amazon’s selling partners can no longer use a default handling time of two days. The company has automatically halved the timeframe, to the surprise of many sellers. From now on, they must manually set longer handling times in Seller Central, on a per-item basis.
TikTok has launched Shop Local in the United Kingdom, a support scheme for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). The competition promotes the sale of homegrown goods to British consumers, with packages to help local businesses set up and start selling on the platform.
Zalando has taken new steps in Southern Europe. The German company has launched a dedicated website for Portugal. Additionally, Zalando has started selling beauty products in Spain, which have not yet been part of the offering in the neighboring country.
Amazon is investing over one billion euros in the Belgian market over the next three years. The American company aims to improve the customer experience for Belgian shoppers and help small and medium-sized businesses grow both domestically and internationally.
Large international online platforms have grown rapidly in the Netherlands in recent years. However, local players still dominate the market. According to the latest Twinkle100, AliExpress, Shein and Temu are not among the ten largest online retailers in the country. Far from it. Amazon has also taken a step back, in both turnover and ranking.
The Belgian government is considering introducing a levy on parcels imported from outside the European Union. The 2 euro fee per parcel would affect Chinese online retailers such as AliExpress, Shein and Temu. The government intends to use the revenue to help reduce the national budget deficit.
Amazon remains by far the largest online shop in Germany, ahead of local players Otto and Zalando. This is shown in a new top 1,000 ranking by retail institute EHI and ECDB. The combined revenue of the thousand top sellers was 3.8 percent higher last year compared to the year before. The top 10 grew the fastest. More growth is expected this year.
Online consumer spending in Europe grew by 7 percent last year, reaching 819 billion euros. For this year, industry associations Ecommerce Europe and EuroCommerce expect another 7 percent growth. Online spending is growing particularly strongly in Eastern Europe.
Most online sellers in Türkiye use only one marketplace to sell their products. This makes them highly dependent on the algorithms, pricing, and other conditions of that platform. Trendyol and Hepsiburada hold an enormous market power.
From February through July, Shein served an average of 145.7 million European shoppers per month. That is over 15.2 million more than in the previous six months. The Chinese online fashion platform is more popular in the European Union than Temu, although its growth is slightly less steep.
In the first half of this year, Temu attracted an average of 115.7 million Europeans to its platform each month. That’s 12.9 million more than in the second half of last year. Remarkably, the growth in Temu’s top European markets was above average.
France is urging the European Commission to take tougher action against online shopping platforms like Shein and Temu if they fail to follow the rules. According to the French government, the EU should have the option to delist such companies from search engines like Google as a sanction. Both consumer safety and fair competition are at stake.
Walmart is actively targeting potential sellers in the United Kingdom and continental Europe. The world’s largest retailer is trying to entice merchants to enter the U.S., Canadian, Mexican, and Chilean markets.
Amazon has informed its fulfillment service users in the United Kingdom and Germany that they can expect an additional holiday season fee. The surcharge applies from mid-October to mid-January and is intended to ensure that delivery speed, fulfillment capacity, and customer service remain at a high level.
The Platform Group (TPG), the German company behind several vertical marketplaces, has significantly increased its trading volume, revenue, and profit in the first half of this year. The number of active customers and sales partners also grew strongly. By the end of this year, the group expects to have 16,500 partners, partly due to new acquisitions.