Nice Gear. Where Did You Get It From? Spain? Italy? Singapore?

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Summer does tend to bring out the shopping bugs. I mean, walking through Valletta and seeing tourists carrying ice-creams from Amorino and bags on top of bags of clothing, gadgets, books, shoes, and pretty much every sweet thing known to man, is enough to tempt the strongest of men (and women).

There’s a high one gets from carrying a shopping bag with new goodies, but let’s face it, there’s nothing like the high one gets from lounging on your sofa and treating yourself to new clothes, household items, books, or whatever tickles your fancy with the simple click of a button. Now we have numbers to prove it.

According to minutehack.com and OnBuy.com, two prominent commerce websites, Maltese consumers are most likely to purchase products online which are to be shipped from other EU countries. Malta in fact tops this list with a whopping 89% of consumers buying their goods online from fellow EU Member States. This trait is also shared by Cyprus, Luxembourg, and Austria, respectively.

E-commerce in the EU is experiencing a 14% growth rate per year, mostly due to consumers opting for goods from their own countries which have been made available online to promote cross-border online trade.

Malta has the highest ever rate of online purchases from EU countries recorded in 2018, and trends are showing that the percentage can be upped in 2019. In fact only 62% of shoppers from our archipelago opted for goods from non-EU countries in 2018. This of course includes commercial websites such as Ebay, Joom, and AliExpress.

This ‘shop online from EU sellers’ trend also hit home in Belgium (64%), Ireland (60%), Finland (52%) and Portugal (51%).

However the trend is not constant in ALL European Countries. Turns out as of 2018, consumers in Greece, for example, are far less likely to buy their products from the EU online market. In fact, last year only 35% of Greeks made online purchases from EU states. This can be compared to a fewer 19% of Greek shoppers who made online purchases from rest-of-the-world sellers in 2018. Low numbers were also recorded in the UK (34%), Montenegro (28%) and Germany (24%.) The research also points out that  77% of consumers in Montenegro made online purchases from rest-of-the-world sellers in 2018, presenting a big disparity in how consumers in this region shop online.

Yet the King and Queen of countries least likely to buy from EU sellers are  Serbia and Turkey. In Serbia, just 8% of consumers purchased goods online from other EU countries in 2018. Moving further into Eastern Europe, only 7% of Turkish shoppers made online purchases from other EU countries over the past year, making this the lowest rate of all countries analysed for this study.

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