Otto saw a significant decline in revenue in the past fiscal year. However, the trading volume slightly increased, thanks to sales from partners on Otto’s marketplace. They account for one-third of the income. Otto aims to expand its marketplace offering within Europe.

The German icon of distance trading announced this alongside its annual financial results. In the fiscal year 2023/2024, Otto’s revenue decreased by 8 percent to 4.2 billion euros. This performance was “still well above market comparison”, Otto refers to figures from the Bundesverband E-Commerce und Versandhandel Deutschland (bevh), which noted an 11.8 percent decline and described 2023 as a “low point” for ecommerce in Germany.

In its press release, Otto highlights the positive development of Gross Merchandising Value (GMV), which increased by 2 percent to 6.5 billion euros. The slight increase in Otto’s platform sales, despite the ongoing crisis atmosphere in retail, makes CEO Marc Opelt cautiously optimistic. He previously referred to the platform model as the “key growth engine” of the online department store.

During the past fiscal year, Otto expanded the number of marketplace partners by 33 percent, to over 6,500. Together, they accounted for one-third of the revenue on the shopping platform.

Despite the long and growing distance in terms of revenue on Amazon, Otto is “very well positioned” with German marketplace sellers, according to Opelt. Now the company is preparing to open it up to European marketplace partners. Initially, Otto will connect warehouses of German marketplace sellers in other European countries to its platform. Starting next year, marketplace participants from other European Union member states can also offer their products on Otto’s platform. Currently, a German VAT number is required for this.

Opelt indicates that Otto has deliberately chosen the European perspective saying that the company relies on products that meet the highest quality and sustainability standards. Therefore, they carefully select who may sell goods on their marketplace and who may not. In the future, cheaply produced disposable items will also not play a role in Otto’s business model.

From summer onwards, Otto will open its marketplace to additional product categories, including dietary supplements and energy technology, ecommercenews.com reports.

Kaufland, one of the larger ecommerce platforms in Germany, is expanding to Poland and Austria late summer 2024. Schwarz Gruppe, the owner of Kaufland and supermarket chain Lidl, has more online plans: it is allocating 200 million for Lidl’s ecommerce activities.

Kaufland, a well-known hypermarket chain in Germany, launched its marketplace three years ago, shortly after the acquisition of Real.de by Schwarz Gruppe. In Germany, the marketplace attracts tens of millions of visitors monthly. The assortment comprises more than 45 million products in over 6,400 categories, ecommercenews.com says.

Last year, Kaufland already became active with its marketplace in Slovakia and the Czech Republic. According to Gerald Schönbucher, the CEO of Kaufland E-commerce, the platform is already among the largest marketplaces in those countries, with many local sellers. He considers expansion to Poland and Austria a logical step.

With 245 stores, Kaufland is an established supermarket chain in Poland, where ecommerce is on the rise.

Kaufland becomes a pure online player in Austria. The chain has no physical stores in that country.

Despite the lack of physical stores, Kaufland claims to have a brand awareness of over 40 percent in Austria. Furthermore, the country has few local marketplace providers with a comparable wide product range that’s why Kaufland sees an opportunity in the Austrian online landscape.

The basis for internationalization is the ‘all-in-one solution’ Kaufland Global Marketplace. This allows sales partners to sell nationally and internationally on the different domains after registration. This year, the marketplace also introduces its international Fulfillment by Kaufland service, enabling faster delivery of orders to customers.

Kaufland’s sister chain Lidl is also heavily investing in improving its online activities. Parent company Schwarz Gruppe confirms to Lebensmittel Zeitung a capital injection of 200 million euros to reorganize and further develop Lidl Digital and improve profitability. Although Lidl is experiencing growth in ecommerce, it tripled its loss in the last fiscal year.

Fresh analysis has been published by Billie, an BNPL solution for B2B sellers.  According to its findings, the total European value of B2B goods sold online is estimated to reach 1.7 trillion euros by 2025. However, B2B sellers in Europe are not utilizing all available opportunities yet. Most of them only allow local buyers to shop their goods.

While ecommerce plays a dominant role in B2C, it still has not penetrated that much into the online B2B market. According to Billie, only 50 percent of B2B buyers use ecommerce platforms.

92% of Scandinavian B2B companies expect sales to happen online.

However, Scandinavia seems to be an exception as 92 percent of the surveyed B2B companies expect sales to happen online. And almost one in four of the B2B companies there are already generating sales through ecommerce.

While cross-border ecommerce is growing in Europe, the analysis shows that most European B2B sites only allow local buyers. This means that there are still a lot of cross-border opportunities left unused. Additionally, 57 percent of the largest ecommerce sites in Germany, France, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Sweden (based on traffic) provide B2B services. And among those, only 50 percent ship cross-border.

The worldwide value of the online B2B market was worth 6.5 trillion euros in 2022. A growth of 18 percent is estimated between 2023 and 2030.

For the second consecutive year, Zalando has seen a decline in its revenue, whereas a growing portion of its income comes from sales partners on the platform.

Zalando aims to actively focus on providing support to other ecommerce companies, ecommercenews.com reports.

In addition to annual figures, Zalando has also released an update of its strategy with lifestyle products and B2B services being crucial.

Zalando closed the past year with a revenue of 10.1 billion euros, 1.9 percent less than in 2022. The income had already slightly decreased that year as well.

However, Zalando operates with a better return: the EBIT almost doubled last year, reaching 350 million euros. The German company recorded a net income of 83.0 million euros in 2023, compared to 16.8 million in the previous year.

Zalando saw the number of active customers decrease by 1.6 million last year, to 49.6 million European shoppers. The number of orders decreased by ten times that amount; Zalando received 16 million fewer orders, but with a slightly higher average amount (+5.6 percent).

The company aims to grow its customer and order base again by expanding with lifestyle products, including sports items and toys.

Third-party sales are becoming increasingly important for Zalando. Marketplace partners accounted for 4.9 billion in sales in 2023, half a billion more than in 2022. They represented 34 percent of Zalando’s B2C trading volume.

In its strategy update, Zalando positions itself explicitly as a company with both a B2C and a B2B division, which will also be reported separately.

Last fall, Zalando introduced fulfillment for third-party retailers under its new ZEOS brand. Under this banner, it aims to “shape the European fashion and lifestyle industry beyond its own consumer business”. Zalando enables ecommerce transactions beyond its own platform, for example, via About You, ASOS, or Otto.

Besides logistics, ZEOS aims to support other ecommerce companies with software and services, Zalando indicates. The good profit figures give the company the opportunity to invest in the strategic priorities of its ecosystem vision, according to co-CEO Robert Gentz. “We have the financial strength to successfully build the pan-European ecosystem for fashion and lifestyle ecommerce.”

Amazon lobbyists are no longer welcome in the European Parliament. Their access passes are being revoked due to concerns over transparency and working conditions, which is a rare decision.

This is only the second time in the history of the European Parliament that lobbyists from a company have been denied access, following the controversial agricultural biotechnology firm Monsanto in 2017. Amazon faces a significant setback in its engagement with the European legislature.

European Parliament President Roberta Metsola acted on the insistence of a group of MEPs. They highlighted Amazon’s repeated refusal to engage in dialogue regarding its labour practices, stating: “It is unreasonable for members to be lobbied by Amazon while at the same time being deprived of the right to represent the interests of European citizens and inquire about claims of breaches of fundamental rights enshrined in EU treaties and EU labour laws.”

The European lobbying efforts of Amazon involve both direct representatives with 14 individuals accredited in the European Parliament’s transparency register and intermediaries working for various companies, according to the Financial Times.

American online marketplace giant Amazon reportedly spends millions of euros annually on lobbying European institutions. The MEPs’ call was supported by an open letter from 30 civil society organizations, emphasizing longstanding criticism of Amazon’s treatment of its workers and asserting that EU policy-making is not for sale.

Amazon, the market leader in European ecommerce, has responded to the ban, stating that they are very disappointed with this decision. It has been active in the European Union for more than 25 years and now has more than 150,000 permanent employees there. The company takes their engagement with policymakers in Brussels and across Europe extremely seriously and wants to continue doing this.

The lobby ban for Amazon in Europe underscores the EU’s increasing scrutiny of large tech companies, emphasizing the need for compliance with regulations and social responsibility.

DHL Supply Chain is the new logistics service provider for Reflaunt, a technology platform that enables branded fashion resale. The collaboration shows the growth and potential of recommerce in Europe.

DHL and Reflaunt claim to have found a solution to the challenge of scalability in successfully reselling fashion items. According to the press release, following a successful one-year pilot with DHL Supply Chain in Poland, Reflaunt will now be able to offer their customers a platform that redefines how brands power their resale operations; bringing together scalability, infrastructure, and cost management.

Under the arrangement, brands contract with Reflaunt to manage their resale operations. All products are handled and authenticated by DHL personnel at DHL facilities. The logistics service provider picks up, inspects, grades, and photographs the products before adding them to Reflaunt’s proprietary technology. DHL also manages inventory, storage, fulfillment, and outbound distribution. According to Reflaunt, the partnership will expand its recommerce capabilities and further reshape the dynamics of fashion resale.

Reflaunt services Concierge and Takeback are already operational with brands like Altuzarra, Balenciaga, Harvey Nichols, and Net-a-porter. The services are fully integrated into a European DHL Supply Chain warehouse operation. Reflaunt reaches more than thirty platforms for outbound sell-through, including eBay, Rebelle, Saks OFF 5th, Vestiaire Collective, and Yoox.

With its new logistics partner, Reflaunt will be able to maximize the sell-through of items, including returns, providing brands with “a comprehensive solution that mitigates the complexities of the resale market”, the company states. According to CEO Stephanie Crespin, Reflaunt brings circular fashion closer by tearing down walls between 1st and 2nd hand, and between ecommerce and recommerce.

The European recommerce market is booming, with Amazon already booking over a billion euros per year in second-hand shopping revenue. Last week, Wish announced a European trade-in service.

A report from the insurance provider Chubb found that the ecommerce problems of most concern among consumers regarding social commerce were different from those expressed by retailers.

Notably, the report found that consumers tend to trust social media commerce marketplaces more than other channels. Social media commerce platforms were trusted by 85% of the survey-takers who used them. Traditional ecommerce platforms, however, had a trust rating of only 48%. Physical stores, meanwhile, scored a trust rating of 70%, and companies’ own digital storefronts had a trust rating of 55%.

The survey was commissioned by the insurance provider Chubb and performed by the firm iResearch. The authors assessed perspectives from 500 adult consumers, as well as 525 online merchants.

Consumer responses showed that 75% of those taking the survey had been victims of financial fraud. Delivery delays were also common, showing up in 61% of responses. That category was followed by lost payments due to glitches in the purchasing process (55%). Behind that was frequently receiving damaged items (42%).

Comfort levels with social media shopping tended to decrease among older generations, with Gen Z showing the highest rate of activity. 46% of Gen Z participants in the survey were comfortable with buying via social media, compared to 30% of millennials, 22% of Gen X shoppers, and 0% of baby boomers.

Putting those results into context, the report’s authors framed trust gaps as one biggest ecommerce problems and a major obstacle to customer loyalty.

According to Amy McNeece, senior vice president of digital consumer partnerships for Chubb in North America, no matter whether it’s on social media or on e-commerce platforms, the customer journey must be simple, easy and give the consumer confidence as their trust is fragile. Delivery issues, damaged products and online scams can all shatter consumer trust in an instant, and customer loyalty is critical in the age of digital commerce.

Trust tended to skew higher in Latin America versus other regions. Shoppers there buying online at least three times per month (75%) showed up at a higher rate than North America (62%), Europe (59%) and Asia-Pacific countries (56%).

Latin America’s fast-paced online shopping reveals a savvy digital consumer. This has been driven by mobile and social media leapfrog behaviors during the last decade. The emerging middle-class consumer has access, thanks to e-commerce platforms, to a wider and broader range of services than through traditional channels.

As for retailers, the Chubb report spotlighted another set of unique ecommerce problems with social media channels. 81% of retailers said they sold through social media marketplaces, and three-quarters indicated that they used social media front-end experiences for marketing. However, trust elsewhere remained a challenge, according to the findings.

Just 35% of online merchants expressed trust in social commerce marketplaces for inventory management. Results were also below 40% for ease of navigation (30%), refunds and returns (31%), shipping and fulfillment (33%) and payment processing (35%).

This skepticism was further illustrated by 70% of retailers indicating that items they sold on social media marketplaces were not delivered in what they considered to be good condition. That failure rate was lower (54%) for goods sold via ecommerce platforms. In addition, 65% of merchants cited a lack of delivery options. 60% mentioned an overall lack of control regarding the state of the goods being delivered to be a problem.

The amount of online shoppers in Europe decreased 1 percent in 2023. However, the amount of regular online shoppers has remained stable. And 7 out of 10 of these regular online shoppers were active on C2C platforms, where they bought or sold secondhand products.

These data come from the E-shopper Barometer 2023 by Geopost, a French logistics company. The report gives insight into the latest developments and trends in online shopping. More than 24,000 Europeans in 22 countries, between the ages of 18 and 70, participated.

According to the report, the share of European online shoppers has decreased slightly in the last two years. Both in 2022 and 2023, the share dropped 1 percentage point. The share of regular online shoppers remained stable. According to 65 percent of them, online shopping is a way to save money.

The use of consumer-to-consumer (C2C) platforms is very common for these regular shoppers. At least 70 percent bought or sold on these platforms in 2023. A third said that their purchases of secondhand products had increased. And consumers mostly sold on these platforms to free up space at home.

There are differences when we look at consumers in each countries. Within the Netherlands, 77 percent of online shoppers bought or sold on secondhand platforms. In Italy, that share was 66 percent. In the United Kingdom, the share was 74 percent, in Germany it was 73 percent and in France it was 75 percent.

At the same time, social media is also ingrained in online shopping. Last year, 70 percent of regular online shoppers used social media to get inspiration or information. And 48 percent bought products directly through social media platforms.

Last week, Shopify has launched its Winter ’24 Edition, which includes more than 100 product updates to its ecommerce platform. These include features to make international selling easier. Merchants can now add a localized online store for up to 3 markets.

The ecommerce software provider launches a Shopify Edition twice a year. It catalogs every platform update from the past six months. These include new features in product merchandising, like color swatches and a file picker where all media files on Shopify are available.

Last year, the company increased the prices of its subscription plans. With the newest updates, all subscriptions have new features as well.

Merchants now have the option to start a localized store with custom markets. They can tailor their store for each market. According to Shopify, doing so will result in higher conversion. As a result, these features make cross-border selling easier for merchants.

The localized store includes a tailored storefront and layout, accounting for regional and cultural differences per market. Other possibilities are currency conversion, setting prices per market, translating your content per market and using local payment methods.

The feature is included in all pricing plans. Merchants can create 3 localized stores. And only sellers using the Advanced plan can add more markets, for almost 60 euros per market.

Recommerce is a relatively new term, which includes solutions like repair, remanufacturing, rental services, reconditioning, refurbishing, and resale. Online marketplaces such as Vinted are good examples of c2c recommerce marketplaces.

In 2022/23, the European recommerce market was valued at 94 billion euros. The market share, compared to the total European ecommerce market, is now 12.3 percent. It is expected to increase to 14 percent in the next three years.

According to a research by Cross-Border Commerce Europe, the recommerce market is projected to grow 5 times faster than the overall retail market by 2025. A previous research indicated that the recommerce market was worth 75 billion euros in 2021.

The researchers already projected that the market will be worth 120 billion euros by 2025. With the market’s current growth, that is still to be expected. This means that the market value will increase 27 percent in the next three years.

According to the research, 76 percent of online shoppers think that the attitude to second-hand shopping has improved. And according to 41 percent, buying second-hand has even become a status symbol. This shows that the image of the recommerce market is still improving.

At least 85 percent of shoppers either bought or sold used goods last year. And 27 percent did that for the first time. 69 percent of sellers in the recommerce market said the money they made helped them pay bills. And 39 percent said that reselling helped them make ends meet.

Many consumers have turned to recommerce for its sustainable image, but the researchers say that there are some limitations to it. Reselling is a positive step, but its benefits could be limited if buyers choose second hand clothes in addition to, rather than instead of, new outfits. Rentals could be more detrimental to the environment, primarily due to the transportation involved in exchanging shared goods. Online peer-to-peer rental platforms offering multi-category fashion products promote sustainability but also increase ‘last mile’ logistics routes for cleaning services.