E-consumers in Greece face online discrimination
One in two Greek consumers is unable to purchase products over the Internet as their credit cards are rejected. This revealing finding, which reflects the geographical exclusion that Greek consumers continue to endure in supposedly borderless online commerce, is included in a report based on a recent survey by the European Consumer Center in Greece.
The same survey also found that about 30 percent of consumers reported that they had been told that goods they had ordered could not be delivered to Greece, while 44 percent of respondents said the price of the product or the service chosen was raised during the course of the order, owing to the nationality or the customer’s country of domicile. Unfortunately only 36.36 percent of survey participants knew where to submit a complaint when faced with such a problem.
The survey’s findings concur to a great extent with the conclusions of a recent European Commission report on e-commerce, which had shown that 38 percent of retail traders and 68 percent of digital traders were found to have carried out some kind of geographical exclusion involving consumers in other European Union member-states. Usual forms of such exclusion include saying they can’t deliver goods to certain member-states, and denial of entry to a website by a user from another country based on the IP address.
