Norway

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.

Ecommerce company Stylight is branching out further in the European market and is now available in 14 countries. As of this week, Stylight is there for customers in Belgium and Norway. The fashion discovery website thinks opening up two new ecommerce sites is 'just another logical step of their expansion strategy'.

Ecommerce in Norway is doing well for some time and with a strong fourth quarter it resulted in a 10 billion euros turnover ($10.95 billion) in 2014. Enterprise Federation of Norway expects a growth of 15% which is higher than last year, in which it grew by 10.8%. 

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.

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.