European online retailers looking at emerging markets

Market expansion is seen as a real ecommerce growth opportunity this year. Almost nine in ten European executives, surveyed by CyberSource, are planning to increase focus on expanding their ecommerce business into new markets in 2014. Emerging economies like Russia, Brazil and China are amongst the most popular destinations.

This was revealed by a research from Cybersource, called Payment Management Perspectives. This study revealed that 86 percent of the executives surveyed from the UK, France and Spain are looking at expanding into new markets. Emerging economies have their particular interest, as these kind of countries have enough active online shoppers, high mobile usage and more importantly, untapped consumer potential. But these emerging markets also have their downside, according to the 300 executives. They have some growth inhibitors, like inconsistent data privacy and security standards and market uncertainty. There is also a huge need for confident fraud management.

Sales in emering markets will get a boost thanks to mcommerce
When asked what kind of countries the senior executives would like to expand their businesses to, more than one third (35%) answered emerging economies. Another 22% looks at more established markets like North America and Western Europe. For a lot of retailers knowing where to expand and prioritising which markets to expand in to first are seen as major challenges, they’ll hopefully get to tackle this year.

Almost 60 percent of respondents think that sales in the aforementioned emerging economies will get a boost thanks to the quick adoption of mcommerce. But at the same time, there are some concerns when expanding to these countries; 87 percent see consumer concerns about data privacy and payment security as something which makes them decide not to operate in these countries.

Fraud happening more abroad than at home
Fraud could be happening more abroad than at home, 60 percent of the executives surveyed think. Slightly more than half of executives think that expanding abroad could delay recouping the costs and that and this could present a major challenge to the growth of their ecommerce business this year.