Romanian online stores alive and kicking

Initiatives in Romanian e-commerce emerged way after the bolder Western businessmen founded the first online stores. This situation pushed Romania on the last positions in Europe as for the transactions concluded online.

However, the delay protected Romanian e-commerce sites from the collapse that made thousands of Western dotcoms go bust.

Most of those having built a reputation in the domestic e-commerce say that recession will not affect them, on the opposite, growth will maintain. Moreover, all the managers of Romanian online stores say that they would start this adventure all over if needed.

The first online stores emerged in the Romanian virtual space three years ago. While the Romanian e-commerce market originally comprised two-three online stores, at least ten strong competitors have emerged over the past 18 months.

According to the managers’ statements, sales worth several hundred thousand dollars were registered in 2001. This is a genuine market now, although the Romanian electronic commerce is carried out through rather primitive tools, especially the payment devices.

There is only one site allowing the consumers to pay with credit cards for the time being, CD.ro, but they are still facing problems, such as the attempts of many Internet surfers to pay with cards that do not belong to them.

“We have been operating for more than three months, and half of the orders sent over this period were attempts to buy products with stolen cards by the Romanians living here. More than 90% of the cases in which the order’s recipient was not the same with the payer were stolen cards cases,” Iustinian Calin Popa, the administrator of CD.ro said.

The payment device, or, in other words, the impossibility to pay with a credit card, is the main difference between the Romanian e-commerce sites and their Western peers.

“I think the differences are quite small, as we had the opportunity to skip the childhood of e-commerce, starting directly from the maturity level where the others were. Yet, there is still a major difference: the lack of modern payment devices,” says Teo Paduraru, one of the directors of Best group, which manages three e-commerce sites, Gameshop.ro, MagazinulTau.ro and Bestcomputers.ro.

“As for the rest, with just a little imagination Romanian designers have plenty of, the stores may be similar. The problem emerges at the management level: resorting to a skilled designer and avoiding the situation when the wheel is being re-invented,” Teodor Raducanu, director with Teora.ro said.

Another big gap between the Romanian and foreign e-commerce stores lies in investments. “The large investments made by the Western virtual stores are obvious in the client relations and the specialised marketing,” Cosmin Golea, executive manager with Emania.ro said.