Georgios Petropoulos

E-commerce in Europe: parcel delivery prices in a digital single market

There have been long-standing policy concerns that high retail prices charged for cross-border parcel delivery service may be impeding the growth of e-commerce in Europe, and with it the completion of a Digital Single Market (DSM) in the European Union. The European Commission has just proposed a legislative measure that seeks to increase the transparency of cross-border prices and also to reduce them.

Geo-Blocking of Goods That Require Cross-Border Delivery: A Preliminary View on EU Policy Considerations

The European Commission has made legislative proposals to address “unjustified geo-blocking and other forms of discrimination based on customers’ nationality, place of residence or place of establishment …�? The Commission’s proposal seeks to address long-standing concerns that relatively few consumers in the EU make e-commerce purchases cross-border within the EU, and that relatively few merchants sell cross-border. The Commission’s legislative proposal avoids imposing restrictions on geo-blocking (i.e. “conditions of access�?) on any goods that require cross-border delivery. The exclusion is understandable inasmuch as cross-border delivery of goods imposes burdens on the merchant – it is clear that prices to the end-user cannot be the same as in the case of domestic delivery. At the same time, this “carve out�? means that a large fraction of e-commerce is outside the scope of the key provisions of the proposed legislation. This paper represents a very preliminary attempt to identify the challenges, and possible responses to them. The challenges regarding shipping costs that initially drew our attention to the problem could potentially be addressed in a fairly straightforward way, but there are numerous additional challenging problems that would need to be addressed, and these are more difficult to gauge.