EU report says online shopping increasingly popular

Online shopping is increasingly popular in the European Union (EU) but barriers to cross-border trade are holding back its development, the European Commission said in a report on Thursday. Between 2006 and 2008 the proportion of EU consumers buying at least one item over the Internet increased from 27 percent to 33 percent. These average figures mark the huge popularity of online shopping in countries like Britain, France and Germany where more than half of Internet users have made online purchases in the last year. In the Nordic countries, namely Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland and Iceland, the proportion of Internet users who bought products and services online was 91 percent in 2008, according to the report. Countries like Italy and Spain are also fast growing markets. However, the extent of online purchasing cross border remains small, at only seven percent in 2008, compared to six percent in 2006. The report warned that numerous obstacles, such as linguistic, practical and regulatory as well as important trust issues are holding back the development of online shopping in the EU. "Already 150 million consumers shop online, although only 30 million shop online cross border," EU Consumer Commissioner Meglena Kuneva said. "We must see to it that adoption of the Internet platform will not be unnecessarily slowed down by a failure to remove important regulatory barriers or to address important trust issues for consumers." As a follow-up, Kuneva will in September present the results of independent "mystery shopping" to identify how and where consumers are being prevented from shopping online across the EU.
Source:Xinhua