Europe

Paylobby, a young startup founded in Munich last year, offers an online comparison portal of payment service providers and consultations. With this tool, it wants to help ecommerce businesses optimize their payment systems for their customers' needs, while reducing their online payment costs.

France, Germany, Italy and Spain want digital giants like Amazon and Google to be taxed on total revenue generated in EU countries rather than profits. The initiative was launched by the French finance minister and is set to be presented to all 28 EU finance ministers this Friday.

Last week, Amazon announced the launch of fashion label Find. What's quite surprising, coming from the American ecommerce giant, this trend-driven fashion label is only available in Europe. But there's a very logical reason behind this move.

More and more business-to-business companies are embracing proven B2C concepts and strategies when they start selling online. Whether it's about marketing or order management, there's a lot to learn from business-to-consumer retailers. But what are the steps B2B companies should take when they start with ecommerce?

Facebook has started rolling out its online marketplace service Marketplace to 17 countries in Europe. The feature, which lets Facebook users, discover, buy and sell items with people in their community, was already available in the United Kingdom, but will now also be offered to more European Facebook users.

Ecommerce in Western Europe will account for 13.9 percent of total retail sales by 2022. With groceries not included, online retail sales in Western Europe will even make up 20 percent of total retail sales in this region.

Parcel companies could improve the efficiency of their delivery by 30 percent if they use What3words, the UK startup claims. With What3words, you don't refer to addresses the usual way ("Main Street 1"), but by pinpointing exact delivery locations using a unique combination of three different words.

European retail organization ERA Europe has joined EMOTA, the European Ecommerce and Omni-channel Trade Association. Normally, national ecommerce associations join EMOTA, the addition of ERA Europe should be seen more as a widening of EMOTA's voice in Brussels.

During the Deliver #2 event last week, the online platform Deliver in Europe has been officially launched. This platform on cross-border parcel delivery services is a new EU-funded initiative that will help small online retailers by informing them about the range of parcel delivery service providers they could use to ship cross border.

Card fraud losses in Europe hit approximately 1.8 billion euros in 2016. The United Kingdom saw the highest losses. The value lost to fraud was worth 646 million euros in 2015, but increased by 9 percent to about 703 million euros last year. Together with France, the UK accounts for almost three-quarters of card fraud across Europe.

German online fashion platform Zalando and Danish fashion retailer Bestseller United have entered into a joint venture agreement for co-owning FashionTrade.com, a B2B online fashion wholesale marketplace. Bestseller was the sole owner, but Zalando now enters into the joint venture with a capital increase at FashionTrade.

Visa will invest in Klarna, one of Europe's fastest growing online payments companies. Today, the two companies announced they have the intention to develop a strategic partnership in the future. Visa and Klarna want to accelerate ecommerce and mcommerce for the benefit of consumers and retailers in Europe.

Ecommerce in Europe is growing exponentially, especially in the southern countries. The online retail industry in Europe is expected to be worth around 602 billion euros at the end of this year, which would mean ecommerce in Europe will grow 14 percent compared to the situation in 2016.

This month, Swedish fashion retailer Chiquelle won the Global E-commerce Award at this year's Global E-commerce Summit. The company's pitch won 52 percent of the audience vote, thereby beating Indian online grocery store Big Basket and Swedish furniture manufacturer Ikea. We interviewed CEO and co-founder Pouya Boland about the award and the latest developments, including expanding to more countries.

Zalando has successfully launched Zalando Fulfillment Solutions, which gives fashion brands access to the company's logistics infrastructure and know-how. Zalando can take over the order fulfillment for partners, from inbound to return.