The European Commission is taking measures to facilitate the buying and selling of goods and services online across the EU.
One of the legislative proposals is related to overcoming the unjustified blocking of online pazaruvanenoto geographically (geoblokirane).
When a user enters a shop in another EU country, the owner does not want his identity document to sell his wares. But too often the Internet user access to proposals in other states is blocked, such as by shifting them to country-specific site or request for payment by debit or credit card from a particular country.
Because of this, the European Commission proposes legislation to ensure that consumers who want to buy products and services in another EU country, whether online or in person, are not discriminated against in terms of access to prices, sales or payment terms, unless it is objectively justified by legitimate reasons, such as VAT.
European Commission proposes measures to increase the transparency of prices of services in cross-border parcel delivery.
Moreover, the European Commission wants more powers for national authorities to protect consumers. The idea is that these authorities can check whether websites blocked users geographically, to order the removal of websites that show deceptive offers and to request information from registers domain and banks to disclose the identity of the responsible trader.
Geoblokiraneto in numbers
The European Commission has examined 10 537 e-commerce site to establish practices geoblokirane in the EU. By mystery shoppers checked goods and services in 8 sectors as the most frequently ordered online in the EU, such as electronics and computer hardware. In the majority of sites do not allow users to buy from another EU country other than that in which they live. So geoblokirashti practices were observed in 63% of sites. Obstacles appear at different stages in the order. In 5% of cases buyers were directly forwarded to another site blocked or were offered other products such as this has happened most often in booking flights (13%) or car rental (11%). When you have signed up to the place of contract buyers were blocked in 27% of cases. When you choose delivery options users have been blocked in 32% of cases. When selecting a method of payment buyers were blocked in 26% of orders.
In the European Consumer Centre Bulgaria there are complaints of Bulgarians that prices in the Bulgarian version of a site are higher than those of other languages and for consumers from another country and they had to pay more for a product because they live in other side.
About two-thirds (68%) of all cross-border complaints received by the network of 30 European Consumer Centres in the EU, Iceland and Norway in 2015 are related to electronic shopping. In 21.48% of them were no problems with supply, and 12% - by price or payment.