UK Freight Forwarding and Fashion Logistics Group Acquisition Expands Ecommerce in Baltic States

UK – BALTIC – Freight forwarding and specialist fashion logistics services group Delamode has expanded its integrated online delivery service ‘EshopWedrop’ with the acquisition of Lithuanian based company PirkAnglijoje. The group states that the combining of its current services with the PirkAnglijoje existing customer base will allow users in the Baltic States to benefit from additional access to e-commerce markets in Germany, Italy and Poland as well as access to EshopWedrop’s sophisticated user IT platform and services.

Historically, customers in Eastern European countries have been limited in their ability to purchase goods from Western European online retailers, due to prohibitive delivery costs. In 2012 PirkAnglijoje was founded to provide a cost effective way for customers in Lithuania to buy goods from UK online retailers and transport them back to Lithuania. Since then PirkAnglijoje has grown rapidly and has established a customer base of over 19,000 clients.

More recently, Delamode Group launched its own similar e-commerce offering in the latter part of 2015, EshopWedrop, to customers in Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Romania. This made use of freight forwarding operations across Europe to consolidate online purchases made in Western Europe, then transport them across to the destination country along existing transport routes before ‘final mile’ delivery is carried out by local distribution partners, or delivered to strategically located collection points. Owner of PirkAnglijoje, Rimtautas Rekus, said:

“This transaction is a natural fit for both parties. We are matching our customer base with EshopWedrop’s strength in logistics and fast ability to open up new markets. This is good news for our customers as we can now offer more access to more products, sooner, at a better price.”

Mircea Bandean, Managing Director of EshopWedrop, commented:

“Expansion into Lithuania represents a move into a dynamic market. With 320,000 of the 650,000 Lithuanian e-shoppers making cross-border purchases, clearly there is a strong appetite in Lithuania to purchase online goods and services from abroad. By integrating the PirkAnglijoje customer base we will have approximately 5% of the market share of all cross border online shopping deliveries to Lithuania.”