Welcome to the new edition of “This week’s news”, a selection of links to interesting articles and news from the worlds of blogs, commerce and e-commerce.
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Last week we mentioned Germany’s most popular fashion blogger Jessica Weiss. A couple of days ago The Hyperland blog of Germany’s public television station ZDF published an overview about the country’s fashion blogger scene, that grew quickly after Weiss had proved that you don’t need to be a major publishing company to launch a successful site covering fashion. In case you want to dive more into the German fashion scene, here are the blogs mentioned in the piece: Stil in Berlin, Modepilot, LesMads, Journelles, Two for Fashion, Styleproofed, Dandy Diary.
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At Twingly we are obviously convinced about the many pros of blogging. But for everybody who has doubts, The Huffington Post has a list of 6 things that you get better at while blogging.
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Now back to e-commerce: Alibaba, the Chinese e-commerce giant, is said to be preparing an IPO in the U.S.. According to Forbes, it would be the most anticipated U.S. tech debut since Facebook.
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Subcription commerce has lately become a pretty popular niche within e-commerce. Instead of ordering items online when customers need them, they “subscribe” on an ongoing basis, getting the specific product(s) delivered straight to their door on an ongoing basis. Now Target, one of the U.S.’ major “offline” retailers, is jumping on the subscription trend, offering about 150 items that can be ordered on a subscription basis.
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Forrester has analyzed the e-commerce growth opportunities for a couple of countries. The result: The U.S. offers the biggest potential to retailers, with a score of 73.4, compared to the runner-up China (51.1 score). Also in the top 10: Japan, South Korea, Uk, Germany, Netherlands, Norway, Singapore and Sweden.
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PayPal-owner eBay is acquiring Chicago-based PayPal competitor Baintree for $800 million.