AN ANALYSIS OF THE ROMANIAN E-COMMERCE TRADE TRENDS IN EUROPEAN PERSPECTIVE

The paper employs regression analysis of relevance to outline significant differences in the perception of Romanian urban customers regarding the evolution of e-commerce, as the most dynamic sales channel, against the background of the econometric analysis of trends in e-commerce across 29 EU countries, based on selected information society macroeconomic indicators. The conclusions of the macroeconomic analysis can be checked for the consumers by an empirical survey, examining the consumer attitudes and preferences about the use of electronic commerce in Romanian urban areas. The analyzed sample comprised 385 young urban consumers, stratified by gender, age, income, employment status and level of education, which were directly interviewed, the questionnaire containing 20 items. Based on the macroeconomic data analysis, the results showed that Romania is occupying one of the last places of the hierarchy of countries according to the number of computers users per 100 inhabitants, due to the lack of computers in the rural areas. The empirical analysis showed that the low usage rate of the e-commerce is due, in the opinion of users, to fear for fraud, the lack of trust in the payment safety on the internet, ineffective web-sites and also due to the low promotion of e-commerce. The main conclusions of the analysis pointed out that, in the near future, new selling technologies are thought to spread globally in each country, company and household.