Online store

Mercadona, a Spanish supermarket chain from Valencia, has expanded its new online shopping service to customers in Barcelona. The launch of the online store follows after opening a new distribution center in the Catalan city.

Henri Lloyd, a brand from the UK that's specialized in sailing clothing, has relaunched its online store. This is the result of a digital transformation the brand has gone through since it was acquired by Aligro Group last year.

There is another online department store arising in Switzerland. Two months after electronics retailer Brack.ch relaunched as an online department store, competitor Microspot will also switch to being an online platform where customers can shop for things like jewelry, diapers, sports equipment and dog food.

Lidl has stopped selling wine online through its online shops in Belgium and the Netherlands. The supermarket chain wants to limit itself to selling only non-food items online.

Swiss retailer Brack.ch, which totally relaunched its online shop two months ago, has entered the market of drugstore articles. Customers can now order health products, natural cosmetics and other drugstore products at the Swiss ecommerce platform.

Retailers in the United Kingdom expect 30 percent of all their ecommerce work to give them back no value. Most retailers are facing some sort of ecommerce challenge. Customer retention, customer experience and measuring metrics are among the most important challenges.

Lidl is selling its groceries online in Spain. The delivery of fresh foods though is only available in Madrid for now. To get the products to customers' homes, Lidl is working together with online food platform Lola Market.

The online store of Lesara has finally closed its doors. After the German fashion startup filed for insolvency in November last year and failed to attract an investor later on, it's now definitely over. The ecommerce company wants to do its best to fulfill orders that have been placed already.

E-Fresh, a fast-growing online grocery retailer from Greece, has had a successful year. The digital supermarket yesterday announced that its sales have increased by 93 percent last year. The company also secured a 88 percent repeat customer rate, while the number of customers grew 94 percent.

Major UK retailer Asos has issued a profit warning, after it saw a "significant deterioration" in sales growth. After the online fashion retailer has shared this unscheduled trading update, shares dived by almost 40 percent when the market opened.

Aldi has rolled out two-hour delivery for its entire range of groceries to 20,000 postcodes across London. It's the first time the German grocery discounter enables customers to order groceries online and then get them delivered at their homes.

The online branches of H&M Group are slowly surpassing the offline stores when it comes to geographical presence. Four of the total of nine H&M brands are even bigger online than they are in the physical world.

Inditex will be focusing even more on ecommerce during the next few years. All of its brands, which include Zara, Pull&Bear and Stradivarius, will be available to buy online anywhere in the world by 2020. That's what chairman and CEO Pablo Isla announced earlier this week.

Ecommerce accounted for a third of the total value of technical consumer goods sold globally to consumers, but in Europe the online share is much lower. In 18 countries across Europe, the average online share is currently at 25 percent.

The Netherlands has the most online stores per capita. In this country, there are about 80,000 online stores with a population of 17 million. That means there are 214 people per online store, a density that's nowhere to be found anywhere else in the world. In the Netherlands, online shops have to fight hard for every visitor.