RetailTechNews rounds up some of the biggest stories in the European retail technology space. In this week’s edition: Zalando Partners with Zabka for New Delivery Option in Poland; eBay Experiments with Offline Access; and Survey: 26% of Brits Shop Online Every Week.

Zalando Partners with Zabka for New Delivery Option in Poland

Customers of German fashion and footwear retailer Zalando in Poland may soon get a new delivery option. According to news reports, the German company has partnered with Polish food retail chain Zabka in order to provide stationary pick-up options.

Instead of receiving shipments at home, customers can choose to have their orders delivered in one of the Zabka stores. The option is only available when choosing DHL as carrier for the shipment. The orders are delivered in a Zabka store; returns can also be left at Zabka for later pick-up by DHL and return to Zalando.

The co-operation does not affect other delivery partnerships between Zalando and competitors of DHL. Fedex remains a delivery partner of Zalando, while Zabka continues to co-operate with the Polish postal service, as well.

eBay Experiments with Offline Access

eBay will remains an online marketplace, but the e-commerce giant is now exploring new ways of keeping customers browsing even if access to the web is flaky or faulty. Currently investigating the use of progressive web apps (PWA), eBay wants to provide web functionality even when users are (temporarily) offline.

PWAs are regular web pages or websites, but feel more to a user like a traditional application or native mobile application, the company explains in a blog post. That means the PWAs act like mobile webpages that function like native apps, thus requiring less data and storage.

These new offline capabilities are not only aimed at users in developing markets that may frequently experience connection issues, but is also to provide a seamless browsing experience to users in major markets. “The offline product page uses the same user interface (UI) components as the online product page, with some functionality disabled. When the user revisits a product page and the network is offline – or a network connection is lost during a user’s visit to a product page – the service worker falls back to the cached offline version, which is the last product the user visited when they were online. As a user, in the offline experience, you can still do things like browse the product, do price analysis, check out reviews, or compare similar products”, eBay says.

The offline access solution is currently in development, but eBay is planning to implement the project within H2 2018.

Survey: 26% of Brits Shop Online Every Week

According to a survey by Ipsos Mori, more than a quarter of Britons do their shopping online once a week, while two-thirds (68%) shop online at least once a month, and 3% shop online every day. Average spending on online purchases now amounts to £220 over a three-month period, increasing from £205 in the same period last year (January-March 2017).

Many British consumers are now making use of membership in delivery subscription schemes such as Amazon Prime – with numbers rising: the survey finds that almost a third of all UK consumers (28%) have subscribed to a delivery programme. Compared with the same time last year, this amounts to a plus of ten percentage points. Subscription schemes have been adopted particularly by the younger age group of 18-24 year olds (40%), followed by 25-34 year olds (37%) and 35-44 year olds (35%).

The convenience of delivery subscriptions may also be responsible for the increasing number of items that are returned: 23% of British consumers returned an item in the last month, compared to 17% in the same period last year.