Inefficient cross-border delivery, in the top three of biggest barriers for online merchants in the EU
According to the Cross-border E-commerce Barometer 2016, inefficient cross-border delivery is constantly in the top three of biggest barriers for online merchants selling cross-border in the EU, says Ecommerce Europe.
E-commerce is changing postal and parcel markets. Global e-commerce streams are revolutionizing shopping, but the current parcel streams are not fit to accommodate this. Almost one out of five EU citizens identifies cheaper delivery prices as the main improvement that would encourage more online shopping from sellers located cross-border in the EU. Similarly, more than one third of online merchants view higher costs of cross-border delivery compared to domestic delivery as an obstacle when selling online abroad.
The creation of an information-based delivery market is also essential and many players are already providing such services, including complaint handling systems, redress mechanisms and return services. However, these players need the fundamental interoperability with online stores and among services in order to be widely available for online shops of all sizes.
In a manifesto published online (PDF file), Ecommerce Europe says:
Larger e-commerce merchants, namely platforms, have already started developing their own delivery services because they consider those currently available too expensive and incapable of providing performant services. In Ecommerce Europe’s view, this risks a scenario in which postal operators move diminishing volumes of goods, and consequently lose their most important and biggest clients. In this scenario, it is likely that such platforms would transform their own delivery services to make them accessible to third parties, for instance SMEs that would like to have their own web shop but linked with the delivery service provided by another platform.
The European Commission has recently published its 2016 Consumer Markets Scoreboard which monitors EU consumers’ ratings of how 42 goods and services markets work. Concerning e-commerce, the Scoreboard reports that the postal services market is strong on trust but must adapt to increased e-commerce, including cross-border. In comparison with others services markets, the postal sector has a higher proportion of consumers having experienced problems and a lower reported detriment.
In Romania, e-commerce was one of the main factors behind the increase in the parcels traffic both at national level, as well as to international destinations, acording to ANCOM cited by Romania Insider. The postal services market grew by 4.4% to EUR 533 million last year. The total postal traffic continued the trend of moderate growth, exceeding 657 million dispatches in 2015.
Ecommerce Europe is convinced that high European delivery performance is a key driver for success for web merchants and their business models. Merchants and consumers need a Pan-European delivery system with open standards for labeling and data interfaces to carrier data, in order to create more innovation and greater transparency in the logistics chain.
