Russia is a leader in e-commerce in Eastern Europe

The Russian Internet retail market with a volume of about 10,5 billion dollars is the largest in Eastern Europe. These are data from a study by Euromonitor International (EI), the Kommersant newspaper writes. The top five countries in online trading also included Poland (4 billion dollars), Czech Republic (2 billion dollars), Ukraine and Hungary, whose market size was 700-800 million dollars.

Due to the rapid growth in consumer demand and Internet use in Eastern Europe, the region’s e-commerce market has grown by 107% over 2007-2012 years, according to a report by EI, an international research company.

The challenges for the further growth of online commerce are high competition in a number of segments and insufficient development of electronic banking tools. Consumers are not fully using electronic payments, and the lack of trust in them hinders the development of e-commerce. Nevertheless, the number of payment services is growing, and the activities of companies such as Qiwi in Russia or PayLane in Poland, offering alternative methods of cash payment, are attracting customers, EI points out.

In the future, the boom of Internet commerce in the region will continue, we are confident in EI: this will be explained by the growth in the use of the Internet via mobile devices, the continuing effect of replacing traditional electronic commerce, as well as technological progress, which allows reducing the cost of maintaining servers using cloud services.

By 2014, the volume of the Internet retail market in Russia will increase to 25 billion dollars, McKinsey & Co analysts had previously predicted: despite the fact that Russian online retail accounts for only about 2% of total retail turnover (which is significantly less compared to such markets, like the USA and the UK - 10%, China - 6%), it is growing by more than 50% per year.

Morgan Stanley gives even more optimistic forecasts for the development of Internet commerce in Russia: according to the estimates of the investment bank, by 2015 year the market volume may increase to 36 billion dollars, reaching 4,5% of all retail sales, and by 2020 year these figures will increase to 72 billion dollars and 7% respectively. In many ways, this will be facilitated by a further increase in the number of Internet users and bank card holders, experts say.