Brussels, 23/07/2013 (Agence Europe) - A lack of consumer confidence in making cross-border purchases in the EU along with continued lack of knowledge about consumer rights. Judging by the main lessons of the consumer scoreboard for 2013 published by the European Commission on Tuesday 23 July, the single market is still far too much of a theoretical construct for European consumers.
In 2013, only 35% of consumers were totally confident about making online purchases from vendors in other member states than their own. Despite the growing number of consumers who are e-commerce confident, the lion's share of this commerce is constrained within national boundaries. The share of consumers engaging in domestic e-commerce grew from 38% to 41%, compared to an increase from 9.6% to 11% for cross-border purchases. Possible reasons include the impossibility of completing a purchase, e.g. because there is no delivery to the consumer's country or because foreign payment cards are not accepted by the online retailer. This is an important barrier to cross-border online shopping. Seven out of ten consumers do not know what to do when they receive products that they did not order and less than a third of retailers were aware of the law on how long consumers have to return defective products to be repaired.
Neven Mimica, European Commissioner for Consumer Policy said: “There has been progress notably in the spread of e-commerce but improvements are needed in other areas. The Scoreboard shows us where we should focus our efforts. It is our window on the market. Its outcome will be reflected in my future actions such as setting up the online-dispute resolution platform or better enforcing rules against unfair commercial practices”.
This scoreboard provides annual classification of 51 consumer market performances based on different criteria: consumer confidence in companies; comparison of choices on offer; overall satisfaction rates; number of complaints and problems; range of choices available to consumers; opportunities for changing prices or providers; differences in prices between countries. The scoreboard also illustrates that the percentage of consumers who feel appropriately protected by current legislation is based within a band ranging from 18%-76%. This underlines consumer conditions that vary considerably from one member state to the next. The most favourable conditions appear to be in place in northern and western Europe. (AN/transl.fl)