Austria

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.

Payments companies Klarna and Mollie will work together more intensively in Europe. As of today, the payment solutions from Klarna will be available as standard for the more than 55,000 customers Mollie has in Europe.

Last year, there were about 9,000 retailers across Austria that sold online. This means that the number of online stores in this European country has nearly tripled over the past ten years. Also during the same period, the number of online shoppers in Austria has doubled.

Austria and China have signed an agreement, which should give Austrian retailers have easier access to the Chinese ecommerce market. Margarete Schramböck, Federal Minister for Digital and Economic Affairs, is currently on a state visit to Beijing, where she negotiated a deal with the Ministry of Commerce of the Government of China.

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.

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.

Sloggi, the underwear brand from Triumph, is now presenting itself completely independently online and has launched an online shop in Germany, the United Kingdom, Austria and France. By the end of the year, Sloggi also wants to have online stores in seven more countries throughout Europe.