German sales for Shein, Temu and AliExpress have dropped 35.5 percent in the third quarter, compared to that same period in 2025. The total sales came to 566 million euros. As a result, the market share has fallen to 3.1 percent. A quarter earlier, their share was still 5.3 percent.

Furniture retailer Ikea is expanding its pre-owned marketplace to three new markets. It is launching in the United Kingdom, Ireland and Germany. This brings the total active markets to nine. It is also starting a buyback service in Portugal and Spain.

The European Commission is working on a new fee for packages from outside the EU. This surveillance fee is intended to facilitate better product inspections. The fee will be in addition to the 3-euro import duty and the upcoming 2-euro fee for customs clearance.

Online sales in Sweden in the second quarter have increased 8 percent compared to the same period last year. All online sectors showed growth. It remains to be seen if this trend will continue the rest of the year.

Including its marketplace, Amazon has a 63 percent share of Germany’s online retail market. Almost all German online shoppers buy from Amazon, which also has a major impact on physical retail. The company directly or indirectly influences 41 percent of German spending in the product categories studied.

TikTok Shop generates far more sales in the United Kingdom than in other European countries. This year, the platform’s gross merchandise value (GMV) in its pioneering European market is expected to rise to almost 5 billion euros.

Nine out of ten euros of online spending that left the European Union in 2025 went to Temu, Shein and AliExpress. In that year, 49.7 billion euros were spent on those platforms. In total, Europeans spent 55.1 billion euros abroad on physical goods. This comes down to 13.1 percent of the total online spending by consumers in EU-countries.

In the summer of 2026, up to 66.7 percent of retailers in Austria, Germany and Switzerland said that they have a maximum item-related return rate of 10 percent. The amount of retailers with return rates over 20 percent has decreased to 23.6 percent, a slight decrease from 25 percent in 2025.

As of today, Austria has introduced a national levy of 2 euros per parcel for large online sellers. The measure applies to online stores and marketplaces generating more than 100 million euros in annual sales to customers in the country. Thousands of other businesses are affected indirectly. Resistance to the levy is therefore considerable.

Growth in online consumer spending in Europe is slowing down. For the current year, Ecommerce Europe and EuroCommerce expect growth of 5 percent in nominal terms. The growth engine in Eastern Europe is grinding to a halt.

Ecommerce giant Amazon has announced that it will expand its service Global Warehousing and Distribution into Europe by the end of the year. It will launch in Germany, France, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom. With it, sellers can reach customers across multiple countries from one single Amazon-operated facility.

DHL eCommerce is looking for more parcel companies to acquire in Eastern Europe. The planned purchase of Venipak in the Baltics is its latest step. CEO Pablo Ciano says the region is now the focus of the division’s European acquisition plans.

ASOS recorded growth in the value of products sold in the final quarter of its financial year, which ended on 30 August. The increase was in the low single digits, following a year in which that value fell by 12 percent. The online fashion retailer also reported its first quarter-on-quarter increase in customer numbers since 2022.

Sellers no longer primarily measure their success on marketplaces by sales volumes, but by the returns they generate. Profit margin has overtaken net sales as the top success metric, while almost half of sellers (49 percent) added two or three new marketplaces over the past year.

Temu has broken into the top 10 online retailers in almost every European country. In four countries, the platform owned by China’s PDD Holdings even ranks first, according to ECDB, based on its 2025 data. Worth noting that none of these countries has a local Amazon storefront or a major domestic marketplace.