Azerbaijan Recommended to Build E-commerce

The European Commission recommends Azerbaijan to implement a package of measures to streamline and promote electronic commerce (EC).

These include the harmonization of legislation with international standards, in particular the laws "On electronic commerce" and "electronic signature and electronic documents", the improvement of the taxation system in the EC, audit companies EC, EC increased security, protection of consumer rights.

The recommendations are presented within the framework of the EC technical support and information exchange TAIEX, reported the Ministry of Taxes (MT).

MT at this stage does not consider electronic commerce as a priority for two reasons - low turnover of EC and selection of increasing the turnover of non-cash trade as a priority.

Turnover of EC, according to the State Statistics Committee, in 2014 amounted to just over $ 8 million, stopping at the $ 8,159,000 as the official rate. Although it was 2.4 times more than in 2013, the amount is minuscule compared with the total volume of retail trade turnover - $ 4.5 billion in 2014. In total 94.6% of EC was a segment of non-food goods.

If in EC on POS-terminals there is some progress - before the start of 2015 there were introduced 82 thousand POS-terminals and by mid-year, their number will increase to 95 thousand, then in EC in the segment of online stores the things are much worse. Azerbaijan takes one of the worst positions in development of retail e-commerce among the CIS countries, which is clearly seen in the comparative analysis of the volume of e-commerce in Azerbaijan with Belarus, Kazakhstan, Ukraine and Russia. The national network is underdeveloped and largely carried out in foreign virtual supermarkets. The volume of online shopping is low, with no accurate data, but at no more than 2 million.

  In Azerbaijan specialized online stores began to appear in the early 2000s, including bestshop.az, topshops.az, giftshop.az, parfumshop.az, place.az, yarmarka.az, paxlava.com, and bakushop.net. On these trading floors there is the sale of home and electronic equipment, jewelry, furniture, food, cosmetics, etc. Analysis of local online stores has revealed a number of factors hindering the development of electronic commerce in Azerbaijan. There is no continuously updated information on the availability, pricing and new arrivals of goods. Underdeveloped is the infrastructure of delivery, resulting in its high cost. Another problem is the return of goods. In most online stores goods cannot be returned. In addition, the virtual goods trading sites offer virtually no credit or installments.

The world of e-commerce turnover in 2014 amounted to $ 1.5 trillion and, according to experts of eMarketer's, by 2017 it will reach $ 2.3 trillion. -0-