Carrefour relaunches website, Walmart buys Flipkart, Pegas launches Ape Rider bike sharing scheme

Carrefour Romania rebrands the website and launches the marketplace

Carrefour Romania has made a rebranding of the online store, the old site www.carrefour-online.ro being transformed into www.carrefour.ro/supermarket. The new online supermarket delivers to customers in Bucharest and neighboring areas, in two hours: food, beverages, detergents, cosmetics, or baby care products.

On this occasion, Carrefour also introduces a Marketplace platform, the first such platform of a food retailer in Romania, called Carrefour and Partners, where for the time being there are available around 140,000 products in different categories.

Read more at Retail & FMCG


Walmart buys Flipkart, India’s biggest online retailer

Global retail giant Walmart has paid $16bn (£11.8bn) for a majority stake in Flipkart, India’s biggest online retailer, making this the world’s largest ever e-commerce acquisition. Walmart, best known for its grocery stores, discount department stores and hypermarkets, is ubiquitous in the US. But its sales have barely grown offline and its online sales account for just a little more than 3% of its business in the US.

Flipkart, founded in 2007 by Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal (no relation), is India’s biggest e-commerce company and has had high-profile investors including Microsoft, Tencent and Softbank.

Read more at BBC


DPD starts delivery in letterbox

Delivery company DPD is expanding its logistic services with ParcelLetter service. With this new service, it will be able to deliver small packages, letters and other shipped materials into the mailbox, states Dutch logistic news site logisitiek.nl. Deliveries in the new service do not, like other DPD-delivery services, require a signature.

Consumers can benefit from the DPD track-and-trace system to follow their sending via the standard Predict service DPD offers. With this service, DPD aims at sendings that do not necessarily require a deliverer to ring at the receiver’s door. For now, ParcelLetter will be a pilot in the Netherlands. In short notice, DPD will offer the service to other European countries as well.

Read more at Cross Border Magazine


Pegas launches smart bike sharing service Ape Rider

Pegas Workshops launched in Bucharest the most innovative bike sharing system in Romania, Ape Rider. The mobile rental system with mobile applications has no predefined parking lots and is part of the global trend of smart bike sharing. The investment in Ape Rider amounts to EUR 3 million, and includes special bicycle production for bike sharing, the cost of the software application, the integrated anti-theft system, project team costs, and Ape Rider’s logistics.

The Ape Rider app is currently available in Google Play and the App Store. After installing it, the user needs to register using a bank card, and place a RON 69 deposit. The amount is refunded once the application is removed. Next, a map of available bicycles and virtual bike parking lots are uploaded to your phone.

Read more at Business Review


PayU launches the MCP service, to support Romanian online stores

PayU launches the Multi Currency Pricing (MCP) service, a solution developed to help Romanian online stores grow their customers’ portfolio abroad more easily, by making it possible to pay in foreign currency at a fixed and constant price. With this new service, before the purchase is made, the customer knows how much he/she will pay in the currency of their bank account or of their card. Currently, the MCP service supports three currencies: euros, dollars and pounds, and will be extended to other currencies.

The currency conversion takes place on the PayU payment page, before the order is paid. This increases the convenience of the acquisition process and the chances that the transaction will be completed.

Read more on the GPeC blog