According to a recent European Commission research, nearly 40 percent of online shops in Europe uses the so-called ‘dark patterns’. This means ways of encouraging or manipulating customers into making a purchase under false pretenses, such as hiding costs and false countdowns.

The study included 399 online stores in 23 countries in the European Union (EU).

It turned out that 148 of them make use of at least one misleading technique.

The European Commission also looked at the apps of online shops. Out of 102 apps, 27 employ at least one dark pattern.

The most frequent pattern is hiding important information: 70 shops use this tactic. This can be hiding delivery costs, the composition of a product or cheaper alternatives. In case of 23 online retailers, information was kept from customers to lure them into a subscription.

In addition to withholding information, 54 websites used visual tricks or misleading language to refer to more expensive subscriptions, products and delivery options. 42 online shops use countdown timers with false deadlines for buying a product.

Following the report, national authorities will contact the companies in question and take further action if necessary. Furthermore, the Commission will evaluate if current consumer protection laws are equipped for dark patterns.

Google will provide more transparency for consumers buying products through the company’s ecommerce platforms, such as the Google Store. The tech giant is doing so to comply with the rules set by the European Union. However, the company still breaches EU laws on geo-blocking.

In recent years, Google was investigated by European consumer authorities led by the Dutch watchdog ACM and the Belgian Economic Inspection. The company was made to comply in order to avoid further investigations and fines.

As a result, Google has agreed to make changes to its ecommerce products and services. For example, it should become easier for shoppers in Google Store and Google Play Store to find out information about the seller. Google’s one-sided cancelling orders or changing prices in Google Store will be limited. Prices on Google Hotels and Google Flights also have to be more transparent.

Aside from these changes in consumer transparency, Google also breaches EU laws on geo-blocking. European consumers cannot purchase certain goods when they are temporarily in another EU member state.

According to Google, users can change their country of residence once a year to get access to local apps and games. However, the European Commision writes, this may result in losing previously acquired content and outstanding credit.

Commissioner for Justice Didier Reynders from the European Commission says that EU consumers are entitled to clear, complete information so that they can make informed choices. The commitments made by Google are a step forward in this direction. The commission calls on Google to comply fully with the Geo-blocking Regulation, ensuring that consumers can enjoy the same rights and access the same content, wherever they are in the EU.

European consumer authorities are said to monitor changes made by Google and ‘enforce compliance where concerns remain’.

May your Holidays be filled with joy and good cheer and the New Year bring you peace and happiness.

ChannelEngine, a Dutch marketplace integration platform, has partnered with TikTok Shop.

TikTok’s social commerce feature has faced problems in Europe. Partnering with multiple ecommerce companies, including ChannelEngine, is hoped to help.

ChannelEngine is a Dutch marketplace integration service. The company has 8,100 brands selling on over 250 platforms. In March of this year, the platform raised over 45 million euros in growth capital.

TikTok has partnered with multiple ecommerce companies in hopes of attracting more users and merchants to TikTok Shop, their social commerce feature for purchasing items in-app.

TikTok Shop launched in the United Kingdom and South-East Asia last year, followed by the United States only this month.

In Europe, TikTok is partnering with marketplace integration platform ChannelEngine to sync retailer’s catalogs. The app also partnered with live shopping startup TalkShopLive from Los Angeles and YunExpress, a crossborder logistics provider from China.

Social commerce has proven lucrative for TikTok. The Chinese version of TikTok, Douyin, saw sales more than double between spring 2021 and 2022. However, a rollout in Europe has faced multiple problems.

A TikTok shopping feature was supposed to launch in Europe late 2021, but was pulled after disappointing results. Last year TikTok Shop finally launched in the UK, but was flooded with customer complaints due to shipping issues, the Financial Times reports. Multiple retailers have also stopped selling on the platform.

The tech and ecommerce sector as a whole have been in a financial slump. As a result, TikTok’s mother company lowered its global revenue targets for 2022 by 20 percent. By teaming up with ecommerce players, the company hopes to give TikTok Shop a much needed push in Europe.

Alibaba Group announced its financial results in Q3 this week.

International marketplace AliExpress has continued its decrease in turnover in Q3 this year.

According to the company, this stems from a decrease in orders after the new EU VAT rules came into effect.

Overall, the Alibaba group reports a loss of 2,8 billion euros.

AliExpress is the business-to-consumer subsidiary of Alibaba Group. It is well-known for its low prices and long delivery times. Last year, it launched a logistics solution in Europe to offer a 10-day delivery guarantee.

The Chinese ecommerce company Alibaba invested in an expansion in Europe through its Southeast Asian offshoot, Lazada. But while Alibaba has been in the region for over a decade with AliExpress, its overall track record has been underwhelming.

Last year, the site had just a 4 percent market share in Western Europe, far behind Amazon’s 20 percent, Euromonitor International data show. In Eastern Europe, its 5 percent share also trails Russia’s Wildberries and Poland’s Allegro.

In total, the revenue of Alibaba Group was 29.1 billion dollars in Q3. This is a growth of 3 percent, when compared to the same period a year earlier.

Internationally, the group seems to be slowing down. During the September quarter, the combined number of orders of Lazada, AliExpress, Trendyol and Daraz declined by 3 percent year-over-year, primarily driven by declining orders of Lazada and AliExpress, partly offset by strong order growth of Trendyol, as it said in a press release.

The company expects that the marketplace will continue to face challenges in cross-border ecommerce demand in Europe, because of the depreciating euro and increasing logistics costs.

Shopify is expanding its Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) program to Europe. The program, which offers Shopify integrations for merchants, was first launched last year. The company is working with local ERP software companies from the Netherlands, Germany and Spain for the European launch.

Shopify merchants in the United Kingdom and France have more than doubled in the last two years. Europe continues to be an important growth market for ecommerce platform Shopify, aside from its majority user base in the United States.

With the ERP program, merchants can access apps that are integrated with Shopfiy. This is meant to connect their store with other parts of their business, such as financials and inventory management.

The Europe ERP program is available as of this month.

Several European ERP companies are already part of the program, such as German players Actindo, Afterbuy, JTL, Pickware, plentymarkets and Xentral. EV4 and Holdled from Spain have also joined, as well as Itsperfect from the Netherlands. More European partners are to follow, according to Shopify.

Compared to other parts of the world, merchants across Europe have different commerce needs and requirements to serve their customers in the most effective way, Director of EMEA expansion Deann Evans says.  Businesses must take into consideration that retail is more than just a transaction. It’s about understanding what consumers want and building a connection with them. With solutions now being specifically tailored to local market nuances, merchants can achieve this even more.

Ecommerce giant Amazon has announced that it will invest more than 1 billion euros up until 2027 to decarbonize its transportation network in Europe. The company will add electric delivery vans and electric heavy goods vehicles to its network. It wants to become net-zero carbon by 2040.

Online marketplace Amazon has been working towards more sustainable operations in Europe for a while now. It launched its first ‘micromobility’ hub in London this summer consisting of e-cargo bikes and on-foot delivery staff.

According to the company, it currently has over 3,000 electric delivery vans across Europe. It expects to grow that fleet to over 10,000 by 2025 with the new investment plans.

Andy Jassy, Amazon CEO says that the company’s transportation network is one of the most challenging areas of their business. Decarbonizing and achieving net-carbon will require a substantial and sustained investment.  Deploying thousands of electric vans, long-haul trucks, and bikes will help the company shift further away from traditional fossil fuels. Plus it will further encourage transportation and automotive industries in Europe and worldwide to continue scaling and innovation in order to reach global climate goals.

Amazon currently has micromobility hubs in 20 cities in Europe and it wants to double that by the end of 2025. The company has also announced that it will invest in thousands of chargers in its European facilities.

It wants to power its operations with 100 percent renewable energy by 2025. This includes operations like data centers, logistics centers and physical stores. A year ago, the company’s operations were powered with 85 percent renewable energy. Overall, it now has over 100 renewable energy projects across Europe.

Website design software WordPress is considering offering core features as plugins instead. With a plugin-first approach, the software could be updated regularly. The consideration comes right before the launch of the newest version of WordPress in November, ecommercenews.eu reports.

Founding developer Matt Mullenweg argues offering new features as plugins in a blog post. It was released during a conference for WordPress-developers in the United States earlier this month. Plugins are add-ons for the standard website-builder, which is also very popular for online stores.

The plea comes in response to a new version of WordPress, 6.1, which is to be released next month. This would include a feature for images called WebP, but this has been dropped recently. Instead, the feature will be released in the form of a plugin.

Releasing features as plugins instead, Mullenweg writes, means WordPress can be updated more regularly. It also offers more trustworthy plugins, the founder says. Instead of a third party, a team connected to WordPress can create these so-called canonical plugins.

We are reaching a point where core needs to be more editorial and say “no” to features coming in as ad hoc as they sometimes do, Mullenweg writes. A plugin-first approach could offer ‘the luxury of faster development and release cycles (instead of three times per year)’.

Not everyone is pleased with this idea. WordPress developer Jon Brown is concerned about its usability. At the moment, WordPress has around 60.000 plugins already. Instead, users can check- and uncheck features, he comments.

Developers for WordPress first coined canonical plugins in 2009. Ever since, the discussion comes up regularly. The dropped WebP-plugin in the newest WordPress is the latest reason for discussion. If WordPress is really making the shift, is not yet clear.

Last year, one out of four packages were returned in Germany. This comes to an estimate of 530 million parcels, with 1.3 billion items. Returning goods is part of consumer protection. On the other hand, the amount of returns brings high costs for sellers, as well as a large carbon footprint.

According to economists from the University of Bamberg, Germany is the European Returns Champion. They interviewed 411 managers of European retailers with an online turnover of around 60 million euros. Additionally, they evaluated data from associations for ecommerce, mail order, express logistics and parcel services.

Reasons

In 2021, German consumers collectively ordered goods worth 99 billion euros online. Of the 1.3 billion items that were returned, 91 percent are clothing or shoes. Only one in ten German online stores charge fees for returns. This is a significantly lower amount than in the rest of Europe, where every second store charges a fee. This is one of the reasons that so many orders are returned.

The large period in which items can be returned is another reason, say the researchers. Besides, most German consumers pay by invoice which makes it easier to return products as well.

The average transport and processing costs per return shipment are 6.95 euros. However, German online sellers are good at recycling their returns. The proportion of disposal in Germany is lower than in the rest of Europe, which makes the costs per return lower than with the competition. This results in a competitive advantage for ecommerce in Germany.

According to the research, just one percent of the returned items are disposed. Over 93 percent is immediately resold as new. The remaining items are offered as second-hand goods, donated or sold to industrial users.

The researchers estimate that 795,000 tons of CO2 are due to returns in Germany in 2021. In comparison, around 6.6 million cars would emit the same on the journey from Munich to Hamburg. While logistics providers are often trying to minimize their carbon footprint, the German ecommerce industry makes little effort to narrow down the ecological footprint. Less than five percent stated that their company measured the carbon footprint of returns, according to the survey.

“The return of goods is part of consumer protection and well-established processes in online and mail order business”, said Martin Groß-Albenhausen, deputy general manager of the Federal Association of E-Commerce and Mail Order. “All the more important to research the reasons for returns, the scope, avoidability and utilization of returns.”

Using Shopify Collabs, creators can discover and partner with Shopify’s millions of merchants, and independent brands can reach new consumers.

Most creators can’t support themselves full time. Discovering brands and establishing partnerships is cumbersome, and creators want to spend their time making content, the official website says.

With Shopify Collabs, creators can easily discover and partner with merchants to build curated shops and share products that reflect their own interests, accelerating their path to entrepreneurship.

Shopify’s goal is to bring economic independence to creators seeing them as a new generation of entrepreneurs. They use their creativity to engage audiences across the internet. Despite the size of the total creator economy, estimated to be worth over $100B, most creators struggle to make money and become independent. Just 4% of creators make content full time.

For merchants, the creator economy presents a new way to find new consumers, at a time when acquiring customers has become increasingly difficult and expensive. Creators are trusted by audiences who look to them to share product recommendations they know they’ll love.

With Collabs, Shoppify is bringing brands and creators together, making it simple for creators to monetize while giving merchants a new sales and marketing channel. For consumers, that will mean hearing about the world’s best independent brands and products from creators they trust.

Collabs helps creators monetize by discovering and partnering with the independent brands their audiences will love.

With Shopify Collabs, creators of all kinds can now easily browse, discover and partner with Shopify’s millions of merchants for free.

Collabs gives merchants a new channel to find highly engaged consumers.

Shopify merchants can use Collabs to discover and manage their relationships with creators, giving them a new sales and marketing channel to find and engage with high-impact audiences. Once merchants install Collabs and make their store and products discoverable, creators can apply to join that merchant’s community. Shopify Collabs can then be used to manage the relationship with that creator, supplying everything they need, like unique links or discount codes, to share that merchant’s products with their audiences. Because Collabs is built on Shopify, the entire process is managed centrally from the merchant’s Shopify admin, which means inventory, order, and customer information are kept up to date, giving a real-time view of the merchant’s entire multichannel sales.

Shopify powers commerce for the creator economy

Shopify Collabs is our latest step in building for creators and making new modes of commerce possible for merchants of all kinds. Here’s what else creators and merchants can do today on Shopify: launch a simple mobile-friendly store with Shopify’s Starter plan; make their link in bio shoppable with Linkpop; integrate directly with the world’s most important social and entertainment platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, Spotify, Google, YouTube, Pinterest; and more.

Shopify Collabs is available to all merchants in the US and Canada today.