News

E-commerce in the Basque Country continues to grow in economic terms, despite falling slightly in terms of the numbers of user companies, according to Eustat data. The turnover generated in 2008 online or by means of other electronic systems, such as email, electronic data exchange (EDE), etc, came to 7,157 million euros in terms of e-sales and to 3,452 million with regard to purchases made.

With respect to the previous year, these figures were up by 11.9% in the case of e-commerce sales and 11.3% in terms of the purchases using this same system.

In absolute values, Bizkaia performed best in terms of purchases by provinces and Álava in sales, while by branch of activity, the purchase figures were very similar for industry and services, and industry was clearly ahead of the other sectors when it came to sales. If the size of the establishments is taken into account, the highest e-commerce figures were obtained by those with 10 or more employees.

As far as the percentage of companies involved in e-commerce is concerned, the number fell slightly in 2008, by 0.3 percentage points, and currently stands at 15.0%. This percentage is mainly down to companies that purchase on line (13.9%) and to a lesser extent, to companies that sell using e-commerce (3.4%).

Therefore, even though online sales were much higher than purchases in economic terms, the number of companies that buy online was much higher than those that sell using that channel.

The number of establishments involved in e-commerce in the Basque Country came to 29,450. It is also estimated that the e-commerce purchases made by these establishments accounted for 22.6% of their total purchases and the sales for 26.9% of their total sales.

These figures vary if the size of the company is taken into account. Thus, 22.2% of companies with 10 or more employees carried out e-commerce transactions. The number of companies in this segment that purchased on line is much higher, as they accounted for 19.1%, and the ones selling using these same channels were far less important (8.0%).

With respect to the channel used for e-purchases, 36.7% used websites, 41.8% email and the remaining 21.5% EDE and other networks. With respect to electronic sales, 59.2% was by EDE and other networks, 21.2% by email and 19.6% through the website. It should also be pointed out that 25.9% of the companies with e-sales received payments online.

With regard to the type of customer buying online in 2008, the great majority of transactions, 88.8% of the total e-sales, were to other companies (known as B2B), 9.3% to private consumers (B2C) and the remaining 0.9% to other end users, such as public administrations (B2G).

Finally, three out of every four companies (78.7%) believed that it would be difficult for them to be involved in e-commerce. 61.0% believed that their products and services were not suitable to be sold through the Internet or other telematic networks and 38.0% believed that it was not a secure means to collect or make payments. Furthermore, 37.9% believe that there is great uncertainty regarding the legislation governing this market, the delivery periods and guarantees regarding any problem that may arise and 37.7% consider that their customers are not sufficiently prepared to use these channels. A further 35.7% believed that development and maintenance cost swere high and 32.5% were of the opinion that they did not have a large enough or suitably trained workforce.