Sweden

While Cyber Monday is still more popular in the United States, in Europe retailers increasingly embrace this day to boost their sales. In the UK and Germany there was an increase in conversion in consumer electronics during Cyber Monday last year, while there was a decrease for clothing and footwear in the UK and Spain.

ICA Gruppen, one of the leading retail companies in Scandinavia, is testing its own ecommerce platform. The company has several online stores running in Sweden, Norway, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, but they all run on different ecommerce platforms. The newly designed platform is now being tested in four ICA branded stores.

Fyndiq, a popular online marketplace in Sweden, received a 20 million dollar (€16.03 million) Serie A funding. Investors are Northzone and Industrifonden. Before this funding, Fyndiq has raised 4 million euros in funding from private investors. With the money, Fyndiq will continue growing in Sweden, as well as launching into new markets.

The total ecommerce industry in Northern Europe is expected to reach sales of 36.8 billion euros in 2014. One year ago, the online economy of goods and services in this region was worth 33.2 billion euros, so this year there’s probably gonna be a growth of 10.8%.

UPS has announced the expansion of UPS My Choice and the UPS Access Point network to 15 additional countries, including 12 in Europe. With these two services, online shoppers and global retailers have new personalized solutions to manage residential package deliveries.

Bring, a Norwegian postal and logistics company that's owned by Posten Norge, has taken a look at the ecommerce industry in the Nordic region. This year's report shows that the consumers' total experience is important when shopping online. And it also shows that there are some big differences between consumers from Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Finland.

Klarna today announced plans to expand its services to the United States in early 2015. To drive this expansion, the Swedish ecommerce company has recruited executives from Apple, PayPal and Alliance Data. In less than ten years Klarna grew to become a well-known and very popular payment solution in Europe. Next stop: the USA.

Online sales in Sweden have increased by 15 percent during the second quarter of 2014. The forecast is that the ecommerce industry will be worth 42.5 billion Swedish kronor, or 4.6 billion euros, in 2014, which also represents a growth of 15 percent compared to last year.

Ikea Group has plans to have an online store up and running in every country where it has stores. This has got to happen within the next few years, after Ikea had a yearlong pause on the online channel. But Ikea still has to solve a big ecommerce problem as it is particularly successful with generating extra sales in its offline stores.

Wrangler has some big plans for this fall: it will launch an online store in ten European countries as well as launch a campaign with Finnish racing driver Kimi Raikkönen to boost sales. At the end of this year, Wrangler's online has to available in Germany, Sweden, Denmark, Austria, Poland, the Netherlands, Great Britain and Ireland. France and Belgium will follow later.

Outfittery is expanding its territory in Europe by opening its service in Sweden, Denmark, Belgium and Luxembourg. The personal shopping service is now active in eight European countries, as it has already been launched in Germany, Austria, Switzerland and the Netherlands.

Online payment solutions provider Klarna recently hired its first employee in America and is hoping to launch in the USA early next year, sources told the New York Times. The ambitious move comes after Klarna became available to British shoppers two months ago. Once started in its home country Sweden, Klarna is slowly moving towards global expansion.

The self-appointed ‘biggest online music store in The Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg’ is planning to spread throughout more countries in Europe. Earlier this year Bax-shop already launched online stores in France (Bax-shop.fr) and Germany (Bax-shop.de). Sweden, Italy, UK and Spain are on the list for next year.

New technology solutions, smartphones and changing consumer behavior has given the Swedish retail industry a facelift. Now, the industry is a hot niche for investors as more and more venture capitalists, from Scandinavia as well as other European countries, are investing heavily in Swedish online retailers and other ecommerce companies.

The online sales of food products in Sweden continues to grow strong. Last year sales increased by 38 percent compared to the previous year. Now more than one in five Swedes has bought groceries online in the past year.