Austria

The amount of online marketplaces in Germany, Austria and Switzerland has increased significantly in the past five years. In 2015, there were only 81 online marketplaces, but nowadays there's 173 of them.

Consumers in Austria like to shop online, but apparently they don't like to do this at local online stores. Only 8 percent of all online sales generated in Austria go to a purely Austrian ecommerce company.

Charlie Temple, an optical online retailer from the Netherlands, has expanded to Belgium and Austria. For the fast-growing ecommerce scale-up in prescription glasses these are the second and third new market, after it also expanded to Germany last year.

Bluecode, a mobile payment solution from Austria, has raised 12 million euros in its latest financing round. Private venture capitalists from Europe, who invested in Bluecode in the autumn of 2018, are investing again in the payment solution for iPhones and Android smartphones.

At the start of the Christmas season, Amazon has honored small and medium-sized enterprises with the Amazon Verkaufspartner-Awards (Amazon Selling Partner Awards). Customers of Amazon Germany chose their favorite companies in the categories 'Partner of the year', 'Innovation champion of the year' and 'export champion of the year'.

Greenstorm, which launched an online shop this morning, is one of the fastest-growing companies in Europe. The German company that provides e-bikes to hoteliers in six European countries, now has an online marketplace which offers private traders the opportunity to sell their used e-bikes.

Signa Retail, the Austrian group that owns Galeria Karstadt Kaufhof, wants to give a boost to its online sales. That's why it launched the New Business Hub in Zurich. Carmen Spielmann, founder and CEO of car-sharing platform Sharoo, joined Signa Retail to lead the new division.

Ecommerce in Austria was worth 7.3 billion euros in 2018. Most of the money that Austrian consumers spent online went to foreign online retailers, although 3.3 billion euros still went to domestic ecommerce companies.

Starting today, AliExpress customers in the Netherlands, Germany, Austria and Finland can choose when and how they want to pay for their goods. This is the result of a partnership between Klarna and AliExpress' payment service provider Adyen.

Supermarket chain Spar wants to start an online store in Hungary this year. Currently, home delivery of online groceries is already possible in some cities in Austria and Slovenia and soon, consumers from Hungary will be able to order their groceries online.

For the first time, Amazon has entered the top 10 of the biggest retailers in Austria. The country's retail trade association, Handelsverband Österreich, has compiled a new list of the top 100 retailers in Austria and after ending in eleventh place last year, Amazon now ranks ninth.

Shöpping.at, the online shopping platform launched by Austrian Post, receives a few hundred orders on a daily basis. The ecommerce platform was launched two years ago, but still hasn't come out of the red numbers.

The Austrian trade association Handelsverband has an ambitious goal: in the next two years, it wants to double the share of Austrian retailers that operate an online store. In order to achieve this, the association has put together a toolkit, which enables small and medium-sized businesses to start with ecommerce in a simple and reliable way.

Klarna has launched its own financing program for SME retailers in Europe. The new initiative is called Boost and is aimed to further support retailers in accelerating their growth. The company promises the application process will be simple and straightforward.

Jingle, a startup from Vienna, wants to be a local alternative to major online retailers. With its marketplace app, consumers can easily browse and find products from local retailers. This month, Jingle has received a six-digit investment from Umdasch, an Austrian company that realizes stores for retail companies.