Online shopping in Romania

Online shopping has finally taken off over the last 5 years, at last.  Many of the forward thinking businesses now offer online shopping.  EMag.ro is one popular option, and they offer mobile apps also.  Of course, Amazon, eBay, OLX, and other online shopping portals are available.  The prices are not always cheaper in my experience, but the variety of options is huge compared to years ago.  Also, online ordering of food has gained popularity.  Also there are price comparison portals like shopmania.ro and price.ro, which can be useful for locating the lowest cost for a product in the country.

Many stores online offer collect on delivery; you pay the courier when the products arrive at your delivery address.  Unfortunately, the courier companies can be difficult to deal with sometimes, and the prices seem to be rising.....but this is another topic

Romaniac
Expat.com Experts Team

Agree what is said above. Emag is a prime example of an excellent online ecommerce platform with an accompanying mobile application that is one of the best I've ever used. Easy menu structure, product filters, one click payments and delivery in typically two days or in many cases even possible the same day or if you pay 40 ron, in maximum 2 hours including during the weekend

Personally I prefer the Emag way, a dedicated easy to use app as opposed to using the web based solutions of Altex or Mediagalaxy which are not a pleasure to use.

Yes Emag can sometimes be more expensive, but they are trustworthy and never had any issues. They also offer a longer 30 day money back return policy (by law it is 14 or 10 days if I am not mistaken)

Of course any respectable company now needs to have an ecommerce solution (especially in retail) as this is were we are heading also in Romania.

Apart from that, there are also now a lot of food ecommerce solutions like Oliviera,  Bringo (grocery delivery in 90 minutes) and even an excellent app like Pago Plateste where you can insert all your utility bills and pay with a single click instead of having to use your internet banking facility to insert transactions, or even worse pay bills at Posta Romana. I

All in all, I am pretty pleased with all the ecommerce solutions we have and I think we will see also more focus on time-saving services (eg order your gardner through an app, a hairdresser to cut your hair at home, a handyman to fix things in the house). Currently these type of services are scattered on the internet while they will need to be centralised to make it more customer friendly.

Not a big fan of ordering online, mostly because of the courier service. As I'm self employed and work all over the place, it's a real hassle to have to be at home all day waiting for them, especially as they're not very precise with their timing ("We'll be round to deliver it sometime in the second half of June.") Ok, not quite that bad, but if I have to cancel work to wait for them, any pecuniary advantage to online ordering is lost. As a result, I usually take advantage of Emag's collection point service and have anything (small enough) delivered to the local post office just down the road, then pick it up on my way home when it's convenient for me.

We use online a lot mainly because all the decent shops are so remote. Also we buy a lot of what we can't get here from Amazon UK & Germany. Some things we won't do without or are not available in Romania. There are many websites where you put in your order & send & then they want to ring you back & confirm it, which is very annoying. My chief bugbear are the sites which will only take cash on courier delivery. This means a trip into town to get a stack of cash to pay couriers. Many websites won't take a card payment at all. There doesn't seem to be much trust in Romania despite the high level of online technology available.