E-Commerce in the EU: The Role of Common Standards and Regulations

Abstract

E-commerce has several advantages for customers and improves firm productivity. The research aims to examine factors determining the usage of e-commerce within the EU with the focus on problems related to standards. This includes especially a lack of interoperability and labelling problems. Firstly, the authors found rising popularity of online purchases in recent years. Despite the increase, Visegrad countries are still lagging behind the EU average. A similar increase is also evident in e-commerce engagement as well as in turnover from e-commerce. Furthermore, they also estimated logit regressions to find factors affecting the probability of firm engagement in e-commerce. Interoperability problems, when selling online, are more frequently reported by wholesale firms as well as those in the information and communication sector. The majority of firms in our sample stated that common rules of e-commerce within the EU could be beneficial. This is particularly important for those reporting problems with interoperability and different labelling.