Welcome to Digital-Business-News.com!

Let’s face it: Amazon is a juggernaut in e-commerce. Their market value reflects this, recently having broken the $1 trillion mark. Mr. Bezos and his company are absolutely smashing at disrupting commerce. What once started as a humble bookselling company has grown to sell almost everything (yes, even groceries!). The thing is, even a company of Amazon’s gargantuan size has weaknesses. It’s just a matter of finding ways of exploiting these weaknesses.

CEO Kevin Systrom and CTO Mike Krieger are leaving Instagram. That means the photo-sharing app’s future will be much more tightly controlled by Facebook executives. It goes without saying that this will have major implications for the service. The news has shocked those around Silicon Valley, mostly because it was so unexpected. So what will the future bring for both Instagram and Facebook?

If you love PayPal and live in Europe, you now have a wider range of payment methods with the Smart Payment Button. Introduced in the US three months ago, Smart Payment gives consumers more choices when it comes to paying. The checkout dynamically shows the most relevant payment methods when one goes to pay. These include PayPal (that goes without saying), Venmo and PayPal Credit.

The Internet-savvy consumers in Germany love to shop online. That’s why e-commerce in Germany increased significantly in 2017. From the top 100 online retailers active in Germany, €30.5 billion in sales was generated. If we compare that to 2016, that is an increase of 11.3%. With a turnover of €8.8 billion, Amazon is still in first place.

IFA had big news this year with the European Retail Alliance, or ERA. The alliance was put together by MediaMarktSaturn of Germany and the French e-commerce group Fnac Darty, who announced their partnership last May. At that time, it was made known that the alliance would immediately be open to other retailers. The European Retail Alliance is said to be the European answer to e-commerce giants such as Amazon and Alibaba.

Posting a meme which includes characters from Futurama may very well be a thing of the past now that the European Union Parliament has voted YES on Articles 11 (link tax) and 13 (upload filter) – sweeping copyright infringement laws that will block any content one tries to upload that includes copyrighted material. Those that support the articles feel they will clean up the Internet a bit, making it more possible to control what is shared. However, those that oppose them see it as the end of a free Internet, an Internet that has kept our lives vibrant and interesting. They feel this falls very much into line with the United States’ decision to end net neutrality.

Have you ever wanted to buy something and didn’t know where to find it? E-commerce opens up a lot of opportunities, but on the domestic e-commerce market, it can be hard to find what we’re looking for. The same is true if we look at digital retail from the perspective of the seller. It can be hard to find those sales we’re looking for. That’s why cross-border e-commerce is an important and lucrative area for everyone involved in online trade to pay attention to. Cross-Border Commerce Europe is a new initiative from Carine Moitier, who co-founded Belgian e-commerce association BeCommerce in 2005.