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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

CDON has announced the local version of Nelly.com in Belgium. The online fashion store was already active in the Northern European country, but that was only through an EU-site in English. Now Belgian consumers are served through a dual language site which is adapted for the local market.

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.

DHL is experimenting with a package delivery system in Stockholm, based on crowdsourcing. Via an app called MyWays ordinary people are used to deliver packages to (other) end consumers. Through DHL Freight’s network of service points in Sweden’s capital the service let consumers specify a time and place for delivery, as well as the fee offered for delivery.