Finland

Ecommerce platform Groupon has closed its operations immediately in Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland. This decision follows after its business has been in decline for months now. Things don't look so swell for Groupon, which has said goodbye to 1,100 employees and exited other international markets recently.

Consumers in the Nordic countries expect to conduct the majority of Christmas shopping offline. But Sweden is the notable exception, as a majority of consumers believe they will shop their gifts mostly online. In total, more than 80 percent of Nordic consumers will shop online this Christmas and almost a quarter of the Christmas shopping will be mobile.

The Finnish postal service Posti Group had run some tests with drones for parcel delivery. At the beginning of this month, the postal company let drones fly while transporting parcels between mainland Helsinki and Suomenlinna, an island fortress about five kilometers from the Finnish capital.

Consumers in the Nordic region made online purchases for 4.29 billion euros during the second quarter of this year. This is an increase of more than 800 million euros or 23 percent compared to the same period last year. Domestic commerce in each respective country grew even harder, by 29 percent.

Swedish online retailer Adlibris no longer just sells books via its website, as it launched an extended range of completely new categories, both on its Swedish, Norwegian and Finnish websites. The expansion was announced earlier this year, but as of today consumers now also can shop at Adlibris for DIY & crafts items, kids & toys products and office supplies.

The Nordic Delivery Conference in Copenhagen was the setting for a debate between four big European couriers. Bring, DPD UK, PostNord and DHL discussed how delivery can be used as a competitive advantage. Here's what they said.

Consumers in Sweden, Norway, Finland and Denmark shopped online for a total of 3.89 billion euros during the first three months of this year. Ecommerce increased by 7 percent compared with last year, although the Norwegian ecommerce showed some negative development. Nordic consumers are increasingly valuing the power of the recipient and want to choose the delivery method of the items they bought online.

Cross-border ecommerce is growing steadily in the Nordic countries. Especially online stores in Sweden are popular among other Scandinavians. Norwegian consumers shop the most at foreign online stores. Ten percent of all Norwegians shop at Swedish ecommerce sites at some point every quarter.

Posti, Finland's national postal service, said it delivered 9% more packages in December 2014 than it did the same month in 2013. The postal service delivered more than 1 million parcels a week during the busiest periods in December, which is a new record for the Finnish postal delivery service.

Compare Group, a Dutch holding company consisting of five price comparison services in four different countries, wants to welcome 50% more visitors in 2015 than it had last year. And in terms of clicks it thinks it could achieve even much more growth. We interviewed CEO Ben Kerkhof, who explained to us why the company mostly thinks about a girl named Lisa these days…

Shopify and Nosto have today announced a global partnership, which provides Shopify's client base of over 120.000 retailers worldwide with access to recommendations and personalization features within minutes. Nosto is a Finnish company that has built a plug-n-play recommendation engine, enabling customers from online shops to have a personalized shopping experience.

The average Finnish consumer produces about 176 pounds of waste per year. We don't even want to know what the average packaging waste is in other European countries. But a Finnish startup came up with a brilliant solution. They invented a sustainable packaging system whereby packages can be returned and then re-used. Meet RePack.

Seven in ten Nordic residents shopped online for a total value of 4.9 billion euros during the first quarter of this year. The most frequent shoppers can be found in Norway, as 75% of its inhabitants bought something online during the first three months of this year.

Some Nordic retailers are well known from all over the world. Take IKEA, H&M and Oriflame for example. But still, online stores from Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland must think more globally. Nowadays a lot of these sites only provide other Nordic languages and don’t serve markets with high demand.