Online store

Amazon is not sitting on its hands in Europe. After creating over 10,000 new permanent jobs last year, the American retailer wants to create several thousand more new jobs in Europe this year. With the extra manpower it wants to expand its European fulfilment network, increase its research and development here and build new infrastructure.

The 'Freien Demokraten' from the city counsil of the German city Wuppertal asked for the Wuppertaler Stadtwerke, the city's municipal utility, to stop its online store in which it sells household appliances and energy-saving lamps. The ecommerce site is said to hurt the local retail industry.

Also has finally opened its online store in the United Kingdom. The discount retailer has kicked-off its online shopping store by offering cases of wines for home delivery. The online wine store was announced by Aldi in September last year.

Ikea is serious about ecommerce. The Swedish furniture retailer wants to expand its web business into all markets. The CEO of Ikea sees its website generating 10 percent of the company's total revenue by 2020. Currently the online business of IKEA accounts for about 3 percent of total sales.

In Europe, Black Friday is predicted to break new records this year. Online retailers are looking out for even bigger sales than last year and are busy luring new customers with fantastic deals. But what about all the returns? Which probably need to be processed at the same time retailers are at the peak of the Christmas trading period…

Ecommerce platform Groupon has closed its operations immediately in Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland. This decision follows after its business has been in decline for months now. Things don't look so swell for Groupon, which has said goodbye to 1,100 employees and exited other international markets recently.

Zalando wants to become an open fashion platform and eventually even the number one tech company in Europe. That's what co-founder Robert Gentz said this week, answering questions about the future of Europe's biggest online fashion retailer.

The largest online furniture retailer in Germany is not a known company name from the furniture industry, but mail order company Otto. With approximately 600 million euros in sales in the past fiscal year, Otto was without doubt the online furniture market leader in Germany. It's four times as big as competitor Ikea.

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.

By running their online businesses unprofitably, supermarkets in the United Kingdom are losing around 300 million pounds (418 million euros) every year, new figures have revealed. Instead of charging consumers a fair fee for delivering groceries at their homes, supermarkets are losing 3 to 5 pounds fulfilling each home delivery.

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.