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Switzerland’s electronic department store Microspot converted its business from a physical retail outlet to an online department store in May and now sells a broad assortment. Microspot is the third Swiss electronic retailer to turn its brick and mortar business into an online department store following rival Brack.ch. Due to the collapse of Coops previous project with Siroop back in April 2018 which was meant to rival Amazon, the business has been working hard in silence expanding where they added created new product categories and employed around 100 new employees.

CEO Pierre Wenger states that the goal is to grow twice as fast as the market, with the target being an annual growth of about 20 percent.

Denmark’s simplified triangulation mechanism is an EU scheme which is applied when there is a supply chain of goods made up of three businesses from different Member States (classed as A, B and C). The businesses are VAT-registered in their Member States and goods are delivered directly from the first supplier in A to the last customer in B. Without the application of this scheme, the business in member state B would need to be registered for VAT in either A or C, but through triangulation the business is relieved of this requirement. Under current Danish rules, the middleman (business in member state B) cannot be registered for VAT in either A or C in order for triangulation rules to apply. However, from 1 July, the restriction is being removed and triangulation will still apply even if the middleman registers for VAT in A or C. The change will open up new opportunities for businesses in Denmark and will allow more companies to take part in the triangulation scheme.

China has launched a cross-border e-commerce hub with its trading partner Latvia. The hub has been opened at the Baltic Container Terminal in Latvia’s capital, Riga, in order to develop the commercial relationship between China and Latvia and to make products from Latvia and Central and Eastern European countries easily available to the Chinese market. The secretary of state at Latvia’s ministry of economics, Ēriks Eglītis, has spoke positively of the launch of the hub, and has said “the annual trade turnover between China and Latvia, currently valued at 640 million Euros, will soon grow to a billion Euros and beyond.”

According to a recent report entitled “Payments Landscape in the Czech Republic: Opportunities and Risks to 2022”, E-Commerce in the Czech Republic was worth 5.25 billion Euros in 2018. In Czech Republic currency, this amount is worth 135 billion Czech koruny. This report was published by Research and Markets, the world’s largest market research store. The report also details popular online payment methods used in the Czech Republic, and demonstrated that debit cards have increased in popularity over the last four years, with the frequency of debit card payments per card increasing at a compound annual growth rate of 19.2%.