Eastern Europe & the CIS
The Region
For this overview, we’ve included the following countries under the definition of Eastern Europe and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS): Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Russia, Ukraine. In all the markets covered by this overview, e-commerce growth is in double figures. Eastern and Central Europeans are buying online in increasing numbers – a trend driven by increased convenience, particularly as logistics networks become more efficient and ubiquitous, and home delivery more readily available.
Eastern Europe is a highly diverse region, economically, culturally and in almost every other way. Its growing e-commerce markets are ripe for investment, with consumers hungry for bargains and for leading brands. But any successful strategy must be built on a detailed knowledge of the local and regional markets and must factor in a high degree of localisation.
The Eastern European
Payment Landscape
The Local Payment Culture
Credit cards are the most common payment method for online purchases in Eastern Europe, with 31% of the market. Cash has 27%, E-wallets have 24%, bank transfers 14% and various other methods 4%. The card market is divided between Mastercard with 44%, Visa 42%, and minor and other schemes with 14%.
These averages are useful, for instance, in highlighting the importance of alternative payment methods throughout the region, but they also conceal a great deal of variation between markets. In Estonia, for instance, cards are used in 18% of all online transactions, whereas in neighbouring Latvia, it’s 43%.
The E-Commerce Market
E-commerce in Eastern European and CIS markets is growing at an average rate of 19%, 3.6% of all retail sales are made online, and the average online consumers spends $705 a year. In the main, the growth in e-commerce is driven by the same factors as in other markets – the increasing ubiquity of high-speed Internet, consumer price sensitivity and the improvement in delivery networks.
Within these countries, 47% of the population has shopped cross-border in the past year, with a strong preference for the Russian and German markets. Russia, as ever, stands apart from this. There, a hunger for consumer goods in remoter regions is relatively under-served by high-street stores. In 2018, 62% of Russians shopped cross-border with China the most popular market.
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