Weekly news: Elefant.ro gets a boost, UGC vs. online ads, Amazon Prime Day is a hit
Elefant.ro gets EUR 2 million capital boost
Millenium Gold Resources, , Olif and Catalyst Romania will increase the social capital of Elefant Online through a cash contribution of RON 9.18 million (EUR 2 million). Elefant Online manages the online retailer Elefant.ro, and currently has a social capital of RON 40.83 million (EUR 9 million). The company will issue some 91,830 new shares with a nominal value of RON 100 (EUR 22.2). The shares will be subscribed by Cyprus-based Millenium Gold Resources Limited (54,868 titles), Netherlands-based Olif (27,990), and Catalyst Romania (8,972 titles).
→ Read more at Romania Insider
RESEARCH: User-generated content is more valuable than online advertising
Results from a study titled “Hearing the Voice of the Consumer: UGC and the Commerce Experience” developed by TurnTo and executed by Ipsos show that most shoppers (90 percent) are infuenced in their decisions to make a purchase by user-generated content (UGC), outranking all other forms of marketing, including search engines (87 percent) and promotional emails (79 percent), which came in second and third. Notably, shoppers are also willing to pay more (81 percent) and wait longer (81 percent) for products paired with UGC.
“Opinii de Încredere by TRUSTED.ro” (Trusted reviews by TRUSTED.ro) is a tool that allows users to grade online shops and leave comments about their experience.
The UK online shopping market is worth 11.4 billion euros
Almost nine in ten Brits have sent or received a parcel in the last six months. That’s no surprise, as the courier and express delivery market showed a €1.1 billion increase in sales last year. The Brits now spend as much as 11.4 billion euros on these services. This amount of sales is an increase of 63 percent compared to the situation in 2012, when the courier and express delivery market in the UK was worth about 7 billion euros.
Romanian Police in Iași recommends payment on delivery
Several mothers were scammed on various Facebook groups to buy discounted pampers and were asked to pay upfront by credit card. The department police in Iași recommends consumers to choose always to pay on delivery when shopping online. GPeC considers these recommendations as a brutal attack on e-payments and the general e-commerce market in Romania and an attempt to discourage consumers to pay using credit cards.
Amazon Prime Day breaks another record
Prime Day sales grew by more than 60 percent from the same 30-hour window in 2016, with a “record number” of Prime members shopping across 13 countries, Amazon said. It added that “tens of millions of Prime members” rang up purchases during the event, up more than 50 percent from last year’s shorter Prime Day. One factor that could have skewed this year’s results was that last year’s Prime Day was for 24 rather than 30 hours, and it involved fewer countries.
→ Read more at cnbc.com; see how Amazon Prime Day works in this video
