The Netherlands

Lightspeed, which provides services to (online) retailers and restaurants, has closed a 166 million dollar (€141 million) investment. The series D round was led by institutional investor CDPQ, which invested about 115 million euros. Part of the money will go to its European office, where the R&D division will grow significantly.

European online retailer VidaXL has started today with making its full assortment available for other online retailers. Through this dropshipment program, online retailers can easily grab all the needed product information and sell VidaXL's products through their own online stores.

Omnia Retail, a Dutch pricing and marketing automation software company, has raised several millions of euros. The money comes from Dutch investment firm Connected Capital and will be used for Omnia's international growth ambitions.

Dutch department store Hema has strengthened its international ambitions by purchasing the international domain Hema.com. The international desire seems part of a plan to make Hema more interesting for potential buyers.

Bol.com is the biggest online retailer in the Netherlands. Again. The ecommerce company, owned by Ahold, ranked first in the annual Twinkle100, a list of the biggest ecommerce companies in the Netherlands. Coolblue and Wehkamp ranked second and third.

French consumers are more open to new delivery methods than consumers from the United Kingdom or the Netherlands. For example, 58 percent of the French would give couriers temporary access to their homes to let them deliver parcels. In the UK and the Netherlands, it's respectively only 36 and 25 percent of consumers who would do this.

Ecommerce shipping tool SendCloud has raised 5 million euros thanks to investors henQ, BOM and TiiN Capital. With the fresh funding, the Dutch scale-up wants to further improve the ecommerce logistics in Europe and thus expand their presence on this continent.

When an online basket was filled with 39 popular summer products in six countries across Europe, the ecommerce industry in France happened to have the highest prices. This 'summer basket' however is most expensive for consumers in Spain, as they have the lowest gross domestic product per capita among these countries.

Picnic, the online-only supermarket from the Netherlands that raised 100 million euros in March this year, has started to build a big distribution center in the center of the country. In about seven months, a new distribution center that covers 35,000 square meters should arise and enable deliveries to the megalopolis of the Randstad.

PostNL saw 36 percent of its revenue come from ecommerce during the first half of this year. That's an increase of 12.5 percent compared to the same period last year, when ecommerce accounted for 32 percent of the Dutch postal company's revenue. It predicts ecommerce will take over 45 percent of its total revenue by 2020.

Dutch postal operator PostNL has launched Flora@Home, a new solution for online retailers to easily sell fresh flowers and plants online. With Flora@Home, retailers can improve the product offering on their websites, while PostNL takes care of almost everything.

Some online stores tend to adjust their prices, so consumers won't go ordering something at a competitor's website. For Ecommerce News Europe, price tracking software provider Prisync looked at how many ecommerce websites in Europe change their prices daily and how high the stock-out ratio is in these countries.

AliExpress, the business-to-consumer ecommerce marketplace of Alibaba, has selected Dutch postal service PostNL as the delivery partner for the majority of its packages to the Netherlands. Sellers on AliExpress will get direct access to PostNL's distribution network, while Dutch consumer no longer have to wait for weeks to get their package.

Last year, ecommerce in the Netherlands was worth 20.16 billion euros. This corresponds with an increase of 23 percent compared to the situation in 2015. The Dutch especially love to buy shoes and lifestyle products online, as well as IT and (near)food products.

Six major Dutch banks - ABN Amro, ASN Bank, ING, Rabobank, Regiobank and SNS - have announced they will launch an all-in-one app this summer. This app, Payconiq, enables users to make direct payments online, in-store and peer-to-peer.