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Abstract
The evolution of e-commerce in Romania in the pastfew years was significant and in 2016 the total amount of money spent on online shopping exceeded 1.8 billion Euros. Since it is believed that e-commerce will be the future trend in global commerce, this topic has an increased importance in the specialized literature. The purpose of this paper is to present the evolution of the e-commerce market in Romania, mainly in the past two years, and to outline the trends that are expected to occur this year and in the near future. The paper presents a short literature review regarding the concept of e-commerce and a secondary data analysis regarding the characteristics of the e-commerce market in Romania.
Keywords: e-commerce, consumer-oriented e-commerce, electronic commerce, e-commerce market, online sales.
1.Introduction
In commerce the pace of change is rapid and one of the most prominent transformations was created through the strong development and expansion of electronic commerce. E-commerce generated a paradigm shift for sales and "has changed the way business is conducted in many industries" (Schneider, 2015), becoming an efficient way to lower costs and increase profits from sales. In this field, both the demand and the supply are going through significantly changes that "pose big challenges for retailers, and also represent unprecedented opportunities to innovate on behalf of customers" (World Economic Forum, 2017). E-commerce managed to form a "global marketplace" (Chan, 2004, p. 284) and created sales opportunities for sellers and many purchasing opportunities for buyers (Schneider, 2015).
E-commerce is believed to be the future trend in global commerce and online sales are expected to grow from around 10% today to 40% or even 50% in some sectors in 2027 (World Economic Forum, 2017). The future of shopping will be therefore mainly electronic.
In Romania, consumers' orientation towards electronic commerce became more and more significant in the past few years. Factors such as a higher rate of Internet penetration and usage, wage increase, VAT decrease and price decrease, contributed to the growth of online sales in Romania in the recent years (GPeC, 2017). According to the official Romanian e-commerce market report, published by GPeC (2017), in 2016 the total value of the e-commerce market in Romania exceeded 1.8 billion Euros, more with 0.4 billion Euros...