Benelux

Lightspeed, which provides services to (online) retailers and restaurants, has closed a 166 million dollar (€141 million) investment. The series D round was led by institutional investor CDPQ, which invested about 115 million euros. Part of the money will go to its European office, where the R&D division will grow significantly.

European online retailer VidaXL has started today with making its full assortment available for other online retailers. Through this dropshipment program, online retailers can easily grab all the needed product information and sell VidaXL's products through their own online stores.

Omnia Retail, a Dutch pricing and marketing automation software company, has raised several millions of euros. The money comes from Dutch investment firm Connected Capital and will be used for Omnia's international growth ambitions.

Luxembourg has granted illegal tax benefits to Amazon of around 250 million euros. As a result, Amazon paid substantially less tax than other businesses. Because of this unfair tax advantage, the European Union has now ordered Amazon to pay back 250 million euros in taxes to Luxembourg.

Dutch department store Hema has strengthened its international ambitions by purchasing the international domain Hema.com. The international desire seems part of a plan to make Hema more interesting for potential buyers.

The government council of Luxembourg has decided to develop and operate a national online shopping platform. This platform will be called "Luxembourg for shopping" and is meant for Luxembourgian wholesalers who don't yet sell their products online.

Bol.com is the biggest online retailer in the Netherlands. Again. The ecommerce company, owned by Ahold, ranked first in the annual Twinkle100, a list of the biggest ecommerce companies in the Netherlands. Coolblue and Wehkamp ranked second and third.

Ecommerce in Belgium was worth 4.9 billion euros during the first six months of this year and the prediction is the online retail industry will surpass the 10 billion euros mark for the first time ever at the end of this year.

French consumers are more open to new delivery methods than consumers from the United Kingdom or the Netherlands. For example, 58 percent of the French would give couriers temporary access to their homes to let them deliver parcels. In the UK and the Netherlands, it's respectively only 36 and 25 percent of consumers who would do this.

Ecommerce shipping tool SendCloud has raised 5 million euros thanks to investors henQ, BOM and TiiN Capital. With the fresh funding, the Dutch scale-up wants to further improve the ecommerce logistics in Europe and thus expand their presence on this continent.

When an online basket was filled with 39 popular summer products in six countries across Europe, the ecommerce industry in France happened to have the highest prices. This 'summer basket' however is most expensive for consumers in Spain, as they have the lowest gross domestic product per capita among these countries.

Picnic, the online-only supermarket from the Netherlands that raised 100 million euros in March this year, has started to build a big distribution center in the center of the country. In about seven months, a new distribution center that covers 35,000 square meters should arise and enable deliveries to the megalopolis of the Randstad.

PostNL saw 36 percent of its revenue come from ecommerce during the first half of this year. That's an increase of 12.5 percent compared to the same period last year, when ecommerce accounted for 32 percent of the Dutch postal company's revenue. It predicts ecommerce will take over 45 percent of its total revenue by 2020.

The American online payment platform Stripe has expanded its services in Europe by launching in Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg. With Stripe, companies can easily accept online payments on their websites or via a mobile application.

Dutch postal operator PostNL has launched Flora@Home, a new solution for online retailers to easily sell fresh flowers and plants online. With Flora@Home, retailers can improve the product offering on their websites, while PostNL takes care of almost everything.