Cross-border e-commerce is an interesting phenomenon. Seeing where people buy their goods and where they don’t tells us a lot about the state of e-commerce. Recently Swedish Post released the first comparative e-commerce report on the Nordic countries (in Swedish) which contains survey results on cross-border purchasing for consumers in Sweden, Denmark and Norway with some figures on Finland as well.
Some of the many interesting bits of information on e-commerce include:
- that Danes spend an average of EUR 712 per online purchase while Fins spend only EUR 557
- that e-commerce represents a little over 4% of retail sales for Sweden, Denmark and Norway while only 2.6% of Finnish retail sales
- that 20% of Nordic consumers go check out the product in a brick-and-mortar store before buying it online.
What I found most interesting was that the survey also asked respondents from which countries they bought their goods, if they purchased them abroad. See the graph for some of the results.
The dominance of the US and the UK is evident. In part this may be due to the advanced state and enormous size of the US and UK e-commerce sectors. But it is surely also caused by consumers’ familiarity with the English language, which is the de facto lingua franca of the internet, and the dominance of Anglo popular culture. This effect of linguistic and cultural proximity on purchasing behavior is explicitly acknowledged in the report.
As is evident from the graph, cross-border online purchasing transcends the borders of the European Union (remember that Norway is NOT part of the EU). Thus, an important lesson we can learn from these figures is that while the European Union is trying to harmonize VAT, shipping regulations, consumer rights and payments maybe Europeans need to first come together culturally and linguistically before regulatory harmonization will have effect and produce an integrated European online marketplace.
Tags: European Union, The Nordic countries
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