Online store

While most consumers in the US will spend a lot of money on Cyber Monday (30 November), in Europe the absolute peak in online holiday shopping will take place on 7 December. Expectations are consumers in Europe will spend as much on holiday gifts in November and December as they did last year.

Romanian online store Click4Fashion.com has begun a strategic partnership with European multichannel retailer Heinrich Heine. As a result, Romanian and Bulgarian customers from Click4Fashion now have the possibility to shop for products and brands from Heinrich Heine.

Ikea is an absolute household name in the retail industry, but it jumped on the ecommerce bandwagon a bit late. And that's something they don’t mind admitting. But the Swedish homeware retailer does have plans to grow its ecommerce business significantly over the next five years. "It will probably be 5 billion euros in 5-6 years from now."

More and more companies, especially those in the field of fashion, have turned to curated shopping. And it seems consumers respond well to these kinds of retail services. Even if the number of users is small, those who already use the service are very pleased and would like to use it again.

Dutch pick up service De Buren will work together with bookstore chain Bruna. As a result, consumers will be able to pick up, deliver and return parcels at the branches of Bruna 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Aldi today announced it will indeed launch an online store. The discount supermarket will start selling via ecommerce next spring, first by wine by the case and followed by non-food products. Also, the company announced record sales of 9.38 billion euros in the UK and Ireland in its last financial year, which is an increase of 31 percent compared to the year before.

Consumers from the United Kingdom and France are most familiar with purchasing flowers online. In the UK, 37 percent of consumers said they had bought a bouquet online at least once in the past year. In France, this share is 32 percent. In these two countries, as well as Germany and the Netherlands, Fleurop/Interflora is the absolute market leader. The question is for how long, as new initiatives arise.

Fashion retailer H&M will soon launch an online store in Switzerland. It's not officially announced yet, but all the indications are that the Swedish company will open its Swiss online store in just a few days. In the physical stores the upcoming opening of the ecommerce site was already announced over the loudspeakers.

Zalando thought it was doing something good by changing its payment algorithm, but it actually backfired. The German ecommerce giant has been the victim of online fraud, as people ordered and received goods from Zalando, but never paid for them. According to the fashion retailer, the sum is about 18.5 million euros.

Groupon is no longer active in Greece and Turkey. The American ecommerce company pulled the plug on its operations in these two Southern European countries last week. It’s still not clear why the Greek site is offline now, but Groupon backed down in Turkey because of financial expectations that couldn’t be met.

Dutch fashion brand Turnover has found its way back into the ecommerce. After the online store closed its doors in 2011, the brand was only present offline in stores from partners. But now Turnover will open a pop-up web store that’s available for customers from September until December.

For the coming years, the online retail association BeCommerce thinks Belgium will welcome about 5,000 new online stores every year. If the expected growth continues, Belgian consumers will be able to shop at more online stores than physical ones by 2020.

An increasing number of Dutch people have become the victim of fraudulent online stores. On the other hand, the number of other cybercrime offences like hacking or identity fraud have decreased. In the Netherlands, it’s mostly highly educated people who become the victim of cyber criminals.

Rockar is an online car retailer that has partnered up with Hyundai to sell cars to customers. After having launched nine months ago, half of buyers bought a car online, while the other half did this in the only store Rockar currently has. It's a great success. Over 128,000 people have visited the outlet in London, more than the rest of the UK Hyundai network combined.

After opening several physical stores in the United Kingdom last year, American Eagle Outfitters is ready to launch its first localized ecommerce website in the UK. Within the next month the online store will open its doors for British consumers.