Online store

Lidl is growing rapidly in the United Kingdom and to continue this further, the discount retailer is thinking about a move into ecommerce. The online activities could be a new way to compete with the Big Four of UK supermarkets: Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Asda and Morrisons.

Belfius, one of Belgium's largest banks, wants to further promote the local ecommerce industry and thus has collaborated with seven partners, so entrepreneurs can start an online store more easily. A noble pursuit, as 42% of the money Belgian consumers spent online went to outlandish ecommerce sites.

Swedish online retailer Adlibris no longer just sells books via its website, as it launched an extended range of completely new categories, both on its Swedish, Norwegian and Finnish websites. The expansion was announced earlier this year, but as of today consumers now also can shop at Adlibris for DIY & crafts items, kids & toys products and office supplies.

On average, 25.7% of a company’s total sales value last year came from online sales. The highest proportion of sales value that comes from online can be found at companies in Northern and Central Europe. Also, for companies that sell online, an average of 85.4% of their online sales came from their own country, whereas 10.3% were from other EU countries.

It seems impossible to make money online with food sales in Belgium. Well, this probably not only applies to Belgium, but that's where a new research is conducted and where the conclusion is drawn that not a single distributor manages to make a profit from selling food products online.

More and more people in Germany buy their glasses online. The online sales of glasses and lenses have made quite a jump last year, although the share of total sales in the sector is still low. And it seems not all opticians are happy with the success of selling glasses online.

Axfood AB, one of the largest food retailers in Scandinavia, is starting an ecommerce pilot project with their subsidiary Hemköp. Starting today, hundred selected customers will be able to order their groceries online and then pick them up at the store or have them delivered directly to them at home.

Dutch online department store FonQ just declared that it had a total turnover of over 49 million euros in 2014. Most of the sales comes from the Netherlands in which it is based, but the company has online stores in Belgium, Germany and France as well.

The online fashion industry in Poland is being dominated by two players. First, there's online sales platform Allegro that, via the so-called Strefa Marek, offers products from various popular fashion brands. And of course, there's Zalando which dominates the online fashion retail industry with its ecommerce business. Gemius shared the latest trends from this industry with us.

Amazon is pulling the plug on its ecommerce service Amazon Webstore. A message on its homepage says the "ecommerce solution to build your own standalone website is no longer available to new sellers". Amazon Webstore customers have more than a year to find a new shopping cart software provider.

The German grocery discounter Aldi is planning to launch an online store in the United Kingdom. If all goes as planned, it would be the first time Aldi is active on the ecommerce front in Europe. Aldi has been offering alcoholic drinks online in Australia since 2013, but the UK launch would be the first real online attempt in Europe.

It's not a secret Italy is lagging behind in terms of ecommerce, but data shows that only 5 out of 100 companies in Italy sell online. This is in stark contrast with the European average of 14% of companies selling online.

Zalando wants to increase its sales by between 20 and 25 percent in 2015. In order to achieve this, the online fashion retailer plans to hire 2,000 new staff members this year. Especially in the tech and logistics field more employees are welcome. If the hiring spree is over, Zalando's staff is about 10,000 people big.

Tomorrow it's Valentine's Day. This is a holiday that's celebrated in many countries across Europe. We checked some major online retailers to see if and how they changed their homepages to do something for this special day. And the result wasn't that positive…

Mega Image, the largest supermarket chain in Romania, could launch its own online store. The company registered the Mega Online trademark, but according to representatives of the supermarket chain this was only done to secure a possible future use. However, it's interesting what this would do to the online collaboration between Mega Image and ecommerce company eMAG.ro.