Shipping costs should be the same in small and large EU member states.
The European Parliament has passed a regulation on cross-border deliveries, which makes it easier for small and medium-sized businesses to expand their markets. Its principal author was Croatian Member of European Parliament Biljana Borzan, reports tportal.hr on October 12, 2017.
“The rules which have been voted on today are fighting against irregularities such as the fact that delivery in one direction can sometimes be as much as three times more expensive than the same delivery in the other direction. The regulation seeks to make it easier for small and medium-sized enterprises to break into the market. So, the goal is to enable their products to be sold in a much larger market than is their city or state,” explained Biljana Borzan.
Online shopping is a growing sector, worth about 400 billion euros annually. According to the European Commission’s research, the increase in online trade from the current five to 15 percent would mean an inevitable growth of GDP at the European Union level of 1.7 percent. The prerequisite for increasing online trade is the cheaper delivery of packages within the European Union because customers have named the delivery costs as one of the biggest reasons why they do not buy online even more often.
“Cross-border deliveries are three to five times more expensive than deliveries within a member state, which is particularly bad for Croatia. Cross-border delivery to smaller member states is, as a rule, twice as expensive as to the larger ones. More than 30 percent of Croatian citizens currently buy online, more than once a month in some cases. Croatian citizens who are buying goods online are not equal to other customers in the European Union. They complain about the difference in delivery prices between Croatia and other EU member states, or about the fact that sometimes there is no delivery option to our country at all,” said the Croatian Member of European Parliament.
The purpose of the regulation is to achieve greater transparency in delivery prices and better regulatory oversight over delivery services providers which should ultimately lower delivery costs for end users and small and medium-sized businesses.
Translated from tportal.hr.
