Ecommerce in Romania: €1.8 billion in 2016

Ecommerce in Romania was worth 1.8 billion euros last year, which corresponds to an increase of 30 percent compared to the situation in 2015. This figure represents only the online sales of products. Consumers in Romania made on average 8.4 online purchases in 2016, slightly more than one year before.

The Romanian ecommerce event GPeC published a report and infographic about the national ecommerce market in 2016. According to them and some major ecommerce market places, the value of the Romanian ecommerce market size (counting only tangible goods sold online) exceeded 1.8 billion euros, showing an increase of 30 percent compared to 2015.

Mcommerce is growing in Romania

While the smartphone penetration rate in Romania was 50 percent in 2015, this number increased to 70 percent last year. More and more Romanians own a smartphone and an increasing number of them are using these devices for shopping online and browsing ecommerce websites. The top Romanian online shops saw a significant increase in mobile device traffic coming to their websites, as over 50 percent of online shop visits came from a smartphone or tablet last year.

But it’s not only mobile visits that are increasing, the number of orders from mobile devices has grown as well. Between 25 and 30 percent of online shopping orders came from mobile devices in 2015, but at the end of last year, mcommerce already accounted for 35 to 40 percent of all online shopping orders in Romania.

The volume of online card payments in Romania increased from 514 million euros in 2015, to 745 million euros last year. That’s an increase of 45 percent. Most of these online card payments (69%) was processed by RomCard, the remainder by Netopia mobilPay. Romanian consumers use their card especially when they pay online for services. For products, the card usage is around 7 percent. Approximately 90 percent of online orders are paid with cash on delivery.

5,000 online shops in Romania

GPeC and the main ecommerce players in Romania estimate there are approximately 5,000 online shops active on the market. “However, research shows that there are over 20,000 websites in Romania that have shopping flow and add-to-cart buttons active.”

The most popular product categories are still consumer electronics & IT, fashion & beauty, home & deco and baby, kids & toys. Of all these categories, home & deco was the only one where the average order value increased compared to 2015.

Even though Romanian consumers spent less per order, the number of transactions has grown significantly. “2016 showed the same growth trend as the last few years, bringing approximately a 30 percent increase for the Romanian ecommerce market. The ecommerce industry is one of the few Romanian industries growing constantly every year”, Andrei Radu, CEO and founder of GPeC, said.