Last week, GPeC Romania surprised us in a pleasant way by publishing an infographic of the Romanian e-commerce market in 2012. The report is based on data collected from GPeC (Romanian E-Commerce Awards Gala), World Internet Stats, Daedalus Millward Brown and EuroStat, and it is available on the GPeC blog.
I will only highlight some of the main figures for Romania :
- The Romanian e-commerce market in 2012 worthed 600 million euro. I didn’t understand why services, utilities and tourism are not taken into consideration when talking about the e-commerce: is it difficult to centralize the data? Aren’t these considered e-commerce? Given the fact that services are a much more complex sector, with larger turnovers, and in most of the cases being paid directly online, I believe this qualifies services as the most e-commercable item on the market. But I remain open to any explanation.
- E-commerce represents only 1.3% of the retail sales, in comparison with the 10% European average. [1]
- 1 million out of 9 million Romanian Internet users shop online. This leads to 11% e-commerce penetration among the Internet users, and 5% among the Romanian population (versus 43% EU average in 2011). [2]
- With a medium salary that varies from 315 to 400 euro [3], the users pay an average of 45 euro for each online card payment in Romanian currency.
- 90% of the online transactions of goods are paid on delivery, proving that the e-commerce consumer is still reluctant to using his bank card for online payments. Or that not all of the 3500 Romanian online stores offer this method of payment (case in which I wonder why are they qualified as being e-commerce stores).
- With an increase of 39% from 2011, the 3D secure card transactions amounted for 218 million euro in 2012. I tried to make a correlation with the 600 million euro Romanian e-commerce market for goods, but I believe it is not relevant to make one as most of the 3D secure card transactions are for services, tourism, utilities, rather than goods. I will let someone from GPeC / RomCard clarify my inquiry.
- In comparison with the other European countries, Romania has an e-commerce market larger than the ones in Bulgaria, Ukraine and Slovenia. However, it is still smaller than Hungary, Czech Republic, Poland (let alone Germany, France, UK, the biggest e-commerce markets in the EU). Once again, I do not know whether the values presented by GPeC exclude the services, utilities, tourism, because the ones I found from other sources reveal that the 2012 B2C e-commerce turnover estimated for Germany was 45 billion euro, 10 bn euro for Russia, 90 bn euro for UK and 46 bn euro for France. [4]
I consider the infograph for the 2012 Romanian e-commerce market made by GPeC to be highly-valuable, as there are only a few trustworthy sources that provide relevant data in order to obtain the main figures. For their future releases, I would suggest taking into consideration more indicators, such as :
- E-commerce contribution to GDP and job creation [5]
- Reasons for shopping online
- Proportion of consumers buying online from another country
- Cross-border vs. domestic online purchases (advantages, barriers)
- A comparison between products and services e-commerce
- Proportion of Romanian retailers selling across borders
If you have some more interesting figures about the Romanian e-commerce market, feel free to contact me at iistrate@pentalabbs.com .
Sources:
[1] EMOTA (the European Multi-channel and Online Trade Association), 2012
[2] EMOTA, Eurostat 2011
[3] Average 2012 exchange rate 1 EUR = 4.458 RON
[4] EMOTA, 2012
[5] According to McKinsey (2011), in mature countries, e-commerce creates 2.6 jobs for each lost
Source: GPeC (www.gpec.ro/blog)
