People in Finland are increasingly buying goods from online retailers located abroad. Foreign web purchases rose by nine percent last year, reports Turun Sanomat on Sunday.
Some 85 percent of online purchases are from domestic vendors. Yet many Finnish retailers seem reluctant to begin selling over the net for fear that they will not be able to keep up with the competition.
The potential customers are out there, though. According to Statistics Finland, two out of every three adults in Finland has made at least one purchase over the web within the past year.
Ancient mindsets holding back e-commerce?
Juhani Pekkala, managing director of the Finnish Commerce Federation, says that domestic retailers are wary of e-commerce because of high costs in the country.
“Taxation keeps product prices high,” he told the Turku daily. “It’s not just value-added tax; costs are also boosted by fuel taxes, excise duties and wage costs.”
Pekkala admits that tax policy is not solely to blame.
With smaller profit margins and higher volumes, home-grown vendors could even begin to compete for customers abroad, he says, adding that Finnish companies certainly have sufficient know-how in international trade.
Pekkala suggests that the scepticism about online sales may also be based in a deep-seated national mindset in Finland, which is geographically isolated from continental Europe.
“Export efforts have traditionally concentrated on a few sectors such as heavy industry and information technology. Retailers do not usually tend to think in international terms. They have operated in a small market area. The large central European countries have traditionally sold their products to other countries,” he notes.