Logistics

There has been a serious drop in the number of European retailers that offer free returns to their customers. It went from 55 percent in the first quarter of this year to 28 percent now. In the UK, half of brands offer free returns, while 23 percent in Germany and 21 percent in Ireland do this.

French postal service company La Poste will soon send parcels to online customers on Sunday. The postal service company will do this via its subsidiary Chronopost and the service is only reserved for goods coming from companies, not from other consumers.

DHL has further expanded its European parcel network. The postal company is now able to offer its cross-border services for online customers in Ireland and Romania, while Croatia and Bulgaria will join the network in November.

French consumers are more open to new delivery methods than consumers from the United Kingdom or the Netherlands. For example, 58 percent of the French would give couriers temporary access to their homes to let them deliver parcels. In the UK and the Netherlands, it's respectively only 36 and 25 percent of consumers who would do this.

Online retailer Otto has further expanded its delivery service. Customers who place an order before 8 PM can have their order delivered to them for free the very next day. The next day delivery service is effective immediately for over 12,000 products.

Ecommerce shipping tool SendCloud has raised 5 million euros thanks to investors henQ, BOM and TiiN Capital. With the fresh funding, the Dutch scale-up wants to further improve the ecommerce logistics in Europe and thus expand their presence on this continent.

Aha, the largest online marketplace of Iceland, has partnered with the Israeli drone company Flytrex to expand its delivery options. By using the drone delivery system, Aha can now deliver goods between two parts of the city of Reykjavik that are separated by a wide river.

International returns platform ReBound has introduced its return services to the ecommerce market in the United Kingdom. With ReBound, online retailers can manage both international and domestic returns using one multi-carrier returns solutions.

Logistics provider Hermes has opened an automated parcel distribution hub in the United Kingdom, which is said to be the biggest one in the country. The hub measures 2,500 square meters and has the capability to process over one million parcels per day.

In the near future, business customers and consumers from Swiss Post can benefit from a new service, which will roll out nationwide. Swiss Post will offer the ability to deliver parcels within four different time slots.

Picnic, the online-only supermarket from the Netherlands that raised 100 million euros in March this year, has started to build a big distribution center in the center of the country. In about seven months, a new distribution center that covers 35,000 square meters should arise and enable deliveries to the megalopolis of the Randstad.

PostNL saw 36 percent of its revenue come from ecommerce during the first half of this year. That's an increase of 12.5 percent compared to the same period last year, when ecommerce accounted for 32 percent of the Dutch postal company's revenue. It predicts ecommerce will take over 45 percent of its total revenue by 2020.

The majority of online shoppers in the United Kingdom prefer fast to free delivery, while retailers think these delivery options are equally valued by consumers. Retailers think 43 percent of shoppers want free delivery and 57 percent prefer fast delivery, but in reality it's 86 percent of UK shoppers who prefer free shipping.

Almost nine in ten Brits have sent or received a parcel in the last six months. That's no surprise, as the courier and express delivery market showed a €1.1 billion increase in sales last year. The Brits now spend as much as 11.4 billion euros on these services.

Parcel companies could improve the efficiency of their delivery by 30 percent if they use What3words, the UK startup claims. With What3words, you don't refer to addresses the usual way ("Main Street 1"), but by pinpointing exact delivery locations using a unique combination of three different words.