Consumers in Italy are more and more interested in shopping online. A recent study shows that two out of three Italians have visited an online store in January, while over half of Italians (53 percent) have purchased a product or service online during this period.

ManoMano, a European online marketplace specialized in DIY & gardening, closed last year with a global turnover of 250 million euros, which is an increase of 180 percent compared to 2016, when the French company generated a turnover of 90 million euros. Its UK turnover doubled year-over-year.

Amazon has launched its business marketplace Amazon Business in France. The B2B ecommerce website is now available on three Amazon marketplaces in Europe. Amazon UK and Amazon Germany already gave business customers the opportunity to buy business supplies through Amazon Business.

The top 10 of biggest retail companies in Austria consists solely of companies that also sell products through physical stores. The first pure play e-retailer in Austria's retail top 100 is Amazon, which ranks eleventh.

Ecommerce in France could top the 100 billion mark next year, according to estimates from the national ecommerce association Fevad. For this year, it's predicted that online retail sales in France will exceed 90 billion euros.

Today, the European Parliament has approved rules that put an end to geoblocking on ecommerce websites in Europe. As a result, online shoppers in Europe will have wider cross-border access to products, hotel bookings, car rentals or concert tickets. Consumers may no longer be blocked or re-routed to a local website. But geoblocking in Europe still won't be fully implemented, critics emphasize.

Almost three in four online shoppers in Europe have made a purchase from a retailer within Europe. And over half of European shoppers ordered something from an online retailer that's located outside the continent. Cross-border shoppers purchase at foreign stores, mostly because of better prices and because they are searching for a specific brand or product that isn't available in their home country.

Chinese online retailer JD.com is ready to take on Amazon in Europe. The company will first launchs its ecommerce platform and delivery services in France next year. After that, the United Kingdom and Germany are next.

It's time to visit some ecommerce events again! February is not a very busy month in terms of conferences, seminars and events about online retail, but it still offers some interesting ones! In case you want to, we've made a handy overview for you, so you know when and where an ecommerce event takes place this month in Europe.

UK parcel carrier Yodel has launched a new service, called Xpect Returns. This is a collection service which helps consumers with getting their purchased items back to online retailers. Customers can now have their returns picked-up from their location within a two-hour collection window.

Buying cheap products online from Chinese ecommerce websites is very popular in Sweden. Every day around 150,000 packages from websites like Alibaba and Wish arrive at Stockholm Arlanda Airport. Until now, customers didn't have to pay taxes on these purchases, but that's about to change. And, on top of that, PostNord will also charge a huge administration fee per package.

MediaMarktSaturn will open a pilot store in Austria in which customers won't have to wait in line to check out. The concept of the checkout-free store is similar to Amazon Go, but will work with a different technology.

When you are an online retailer that's active in the Netherlands, you can't go around offering iDeal. The payment method now has a market share of 57 percent in its home market. Last year, Dutch online shoppers paid almost 33 billion euros in over 378 million iDeal transactions.

Shop Apotheke Europe saw its consolidated revenue increase by 60 percent to 284 million euros at the end of last year. This is partly because of a major increase in the number of active customers, but also because of the acquisition of Europa Apotheek in September.

Toy retailers are in a difficult spot. Online shopping keeps growing and offline retailers are suffering because of this. That's why in Denmark, online toy retailer Coolshop joined forces with nine physical toy stores. And now they are all doing well.