GPeC study: Romanians preferences when shopping online
According to a study made by GPeC and iSense Solutions, Romanians are visiting online stores 3-4 times a week and 77% are buying at least twice a year from the same online store. When choosing an online store, Romanians consider the price of services or products and choose to buy online in order to save time.
Those who aren’t buying are visiting online stores around 5 times a year. Among them, 64% don’t intend to make online purchases in the next 3 months, afraid that the products sold online don’t match reality (69%), because they cannot test the acquired products (53%) or because their are afraid of potential frauds (51%).
eMag is number one in the top of websites where Romanians purchase most often, being preferred by 58% of online buyers. Next in order are OLX classifieds website and the online retailer elefant.ro. The same players are occupying the top 3 positions also in the top of the online platforms where Romanians made purchases during last 12 months. Next are Okazii.ro (18%) and H&M (17%).
With an average of 3 buys per year, 90% of Romanians who participated to the study prefer to buy online electronics and appliances, followed by computers, software and hardware accessories (82%), clothes and shoes (80%), cosmetics and pharma products (77%), holidays and tourism services (70%), telecom services (69%), books, magazines and DVDs (67%) or food and catering products (55%).
During a year, Romanians spend most for tourism, buying electronics and appliances, auto accessories, computers, software and hardware products or furniture and interior deco products.
When it comes of reasons to buy online, 72% Romanians do so to save time, 51% prefer online shopping due to a bigger variety of products and the possibility to easily compare products’ offers. For 48% online buyers, more accessible prices are the main criteria to select an online store, while 43% say they found the product they wanted only online. 41% buy from online stores out of commodity, while 6% consider online buys as most popular.
When choosing to buy online, the main evaluation criteria for Romanian buyers are price, trust offered by the online store, delivery time, quality of the info on the website and easiness of the purchasing process.
Most Romanians (78%) still continue to prefer cash on delivery, 50% say they pay also online with their card, then cash in store. Only 9% prefer bank transfers or online money transfer services.
When it comes of online payments, lack of trust in the online store is the main factor why Romanians aren’t using their cards, fraud is the second while the long time to recover the money in case of a return is another strong enough reason to not pay online with the card.
The average amount Romanians paid online by card was Euro 350