Europe

Photoslurp, a Spanish visual commerce platform, just received an investment of 750,000 euros. The funding round was led by Spanish VC firm Inveready Technology Investment Group and joined by Bankinter VC, Caixa Capital Risc and ICF. Photoslurp wants to use this money to further expand in Europe.

November is the second-to-last month of the year, so maybe you are really ready for the holiday season. But first, why don't you attend some interesting ecommerce events in Europe? 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.

New research has revealed that on average, only half of retailers in Europe offer an express delivery option, while just 6 percent offer same day delivery. It's the United Kingdom that leads the way in terms of delivery options available to customers. With an average of 4.4 options it's way ahead of the European average of 2.7 options.

The demand for urban logistics space throughout Europe is growing, as there is an increasing number of ecommerce orders. It's forecasted the parcel volume in Europe will be increased with 69 percent by 2021. And online retailers want to please customers with last mile deliveries, so more warehouses in and around cities are needed.

Safe.Shop has launched today as the first global ecommerce trust mark. Safe.Shop wants to help improve the customer confidence, while further boosting the ecommerce trade worldwide. National ecommerce associations from 13 different countries are the first connected trust mark partners.

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.

Among the ten economies in the world that are most ready to benefit from ecommerce, seven are European. For the third straight year, Luxembourg ranks first on UNCTAD's ranking of countries' capacity to support online shopping. Switzerland and Norway complete the top three.

There are over 800,000 online stores in Europe, research from Ecommerce News Europe in collaboration with Dataprovider shows. These online stores are widely spread across the continent, but most ecommerce websites can be found in Germany, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands.

Amazon is actively looking for partnerships and acquisitions in Europe. The American ecommerce giant has approached FMCG retailers, such as leading UK supermarket chain Morrisons and major French retail chain Monoprix.

Autumn is here, so it's getting colder and people want to stay inside. Well, why don't mix business with pleasure and visit some interesting ecommerce events in Europe? 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.

Ecommerce in Europe will increase by 19 percent during 2017, the Global Ecommerce Association predicts. Only in Asia, ecommerce will be growing harder this year. But with Europe having the highest internet penetration, the ecommerce boom in this region is all the more striking.

Online shoppers are more satisfied with returns than last year, but still the overall customer satisfaction with returns (67 percent) is still much lower than the satisfaction with online delivery (85 percent). Online retailers should have a returns service that offers convenience, while also giving customers better in-transit information about their order.

More and more ecommerce companies fail to register with product responsibility organizations even though they are acting as distant sellers. This makes it hard to get hold of the responsible person and to enforce the extended producer responsibility obligations. Some voices are now saying EU states should oblige online sellers to take on the duties of producer for the products they sell on behalf on non WEEE registered companies.

There has been a serious drop in the number of European retailers that offer free returns to their customers. It went from 55 percent in the first quarter of this year to 28 percent now. In the UK, half of brands offer free returns, while 23 percent in Germany and 21 percent in Ireland do this.

Google has decided to split off its own shopping service, Google Shopping, so it would meet demands from the European Union. The EU wasn't particularly happy with how Google displayed product search results, prioritizing results from Google Shopping in favor of results from competitors.