Europe

The online store of Lesara has finally closed its doors. After the German fashion startup filed for insolvency in November last year and failed to attract an investor later on, it's now definitely over. The ecommerce company wants to do its best to fulfill orders that have been placed already.

Deliveroo has ambitious plans for 2019. The online food delivery platform wants to be available for 100 million people across Europe at the end of this year. The plan is to connected 85,000 restaurants, while developing 1,700 new 'virtual brands', which lets restaurants offer dishes from their existing cuisine, but with a different brand name.

Fashion retailer Zalando will expand its relatively new beauty category in Europe. Over the next two months, the German ecommerce company will start selling its beauty products in Sweden, Denmark, France, Belgium and Italy.

Lentiamo, the largest online contact lens retailer in the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Italy, wants to become the European market leader for eye care. The online store generated a turnover of 27.3 million euros in 2018 and wants to grow further, among other things with their own solution Solunate and by selling their own line of contact lenses.

International review website Trustpilot has raised 55 million dollar – about 48.5 million euros – during a Series E investment round, led by Sunley House. With the fresh capital, Trustpilot wants to strengthen its position as market leader in several countries by investing in marketing, personnel and its technology platform.

The European Parliament, the Council of the European Union and the European Commission want rules to make it easier for businesses and traders to use online marketplaces and platforms. They have now agreed to set up seven new rules to improve the fairness of online platforms' trading practices.

Cross-border ecommerce is becoming increasingly popular in Europe. Of the parcels bought cross-border last year, 38 percent were purchased from China. And consumers prefer more and more to shop across the borders using their smartphones.

Shopify has passed the 1 billion dollar revenue mark. The company's full revenue growth for 2018 reached 1.073 billion dollars, which corresponds to 950 million euros. This revenue mark is a 59 percent increase from the situation last year.

Sales of food and personal care are going well in European ecommerce and are set to increase by 54 percent in the next years. This means the online food and personal care industry will be worth over 56 billion euros by 2022.

The volume of retail sales via mail order houses or the internet keeps on growing in Europe. In 2017, the figures show a year-on-year increase of 12 percent in the European Union. Estonia showed the largest annual growth, while there were falls in Finland and Portugal.

The popular French online shop Vente-Privee has merged with five other brands to form a new online store called Veepee. This new name will now be used in fourteen different countries in which Vente-Privee, Vente-Exclusive and the three other European brands are active.

Alipay, the fintech company owned by Alibaba, has obtained an electronic money license in Luxembourg. With this license, Alipay can serve the European market. The Asian payments company is already present with a licensed entity in London, but it can now serve customers across Europe.

The Ecommerce News staff is enjoying the holidays in the presence of their family and friends. So, there are no posts for the coming days. But please, enjoy these beautiful, funny and touching Christmas ads, from retailers such as John Lewis, Amazon and Asda.

The European Commission has given fashion retailer Guess a fine worth almost 40 million euros (39,821,000 to be precise). The US company got the fine for restricting retailers from online advertising and selling cross-border to consumers in other EU countries. This is called geo-blocking and in breach of European competition rules.

In Europe, Google was forced to open up its shopping service to outside competitors. But now it seems that digital marketing agencies are profiting from the changed auction model instead of the traditional comparison shopping sites: 23 percent of all ads seem to be from marketing agencies.