More than 5,000 Romanian merchants sold in the first seven months of this year almost 192,000 products on eBay, one of the largest e-commerce platforms in the world, with 175 million buyers in 190 markets. “Our aim is to create as many opportunities as possible for Romanian merchants and to offer instruments helping them to grow their sales, through a simpler integration of logistic services. Recently, we have launched customer relation support in Romanian and we have been in negotiations with several logistic companies including big transnational transport companies and local providers. As regards e-commerce, the local demand is limited, therefore it makes sense for these enterprises to sell on external markets which provides them with countless growth opportunities”, stated Ilya Kretov (photo), general manager eBay Russia and Emerging Europe.
The best-selling products are those from categories such as video games and consoles, watches and jewelry, auto parts and accessories, cell phones and accessories, fashion or health and beauty. For example, a wristwatch is sold every hour and a piece of clothing or a pair of shoes is sold every 30 minutes.
Approximately 98% of the merchants in Romania who listed their products on eBay platforms are selling their products across borders, which means they understood the impact of the cross-border commerce in the development of the business. In order to promote their products on the external market, the merchants can access several extra tools developed by eBay, such as listing their products on different regional eBay sites, advertising management or shipping to overseas warehouses.
eBay has developed eBaymag, a service for merchants who want to sell on external markets, that makes it possible to simultaneously list products on more than eight markets, provides automatic translation of the products’ description from the local language to that of the countries listed on the platform, automatically updates the stock after a sale and provides customer support in several international languages, including Romanian.
Any merchant or individuals can create an account on eBay to sell new or used items. Although the platform is mostly known for online auctions, 80% of eBay products are new and 88% of them have a fixed price.
In the past year, nearly 130,000 customers in Romania bought products on eBay, being able to choose from a range of over one billion products sold by merchants worldwide.
Globally, eBay registered revenues of USD 2.6 billion in the second quarter of 2018, up by 9% year on year. Overall sales increased by 10% over the same period and stood at USD 23.6 billion. The overall number of active customers on eBay platforms increased by 4% in the second quarter of the year, to 175 million individuals.
