Maltese consumers know their rights, EU scoreboard shows

The Maltese are your best go-to population if you have any questions about faulty products and guarantees, a study by the European Commission on online shopping has found.

The Consumer Conditions Scoreboard – an EU-wide survey that tracks the situation and behavior of consumers across member states – has shown that Malta had the highest proportion (66%) of correct answers to the question on faulty product guarantee. 

However, the island is amongst the lowest in terms of correct answers to the questions on promotion of products for children (63%) and the use of premium rate phone numbers (52%).

The scoreboard also finds Germany and Malta among the countries with the lowest prevalence of unfair practices in the EU, based on consumers’ assessments. However, they have a much worse performance in the retailers’ eyes.

On product safety warnings, a third of retailers who sell non-food products (33%) say that public authorities have issued product safety warnings in their sector in the last 24 months. 

The same proportion of EU retailers says that public authorities have asked for product recalls or withdrawals in their sector in the last 24 months. On average, these measures were most common in Ireland (44 %), Malta (42 %) and Germany (40 %), as opposed to 13% in Lithuania and 15% in Estonia. 

The European Union is also trying to push the promotion of alternative dispute resolution (ADR) mechanisms. According to the scoreboard, the proportion of retailers who are willing or obliged to participate in an ADR scheme ranges from 53% in Malta, 44% in Hungary and 43% in Spain to 14% in Latvia, 16% in Lithuania and 17% in Cyprus. 

These indicators are expected to considerably improve due to the implementation of the ADR Directive, the European Commission believes.

In 2014, only 15% of consumers reported buying goods or services via the internet from other EU countries while 44% bought from national sellers/providers.

Less than a tenth of consumers (8%) reported buying online from sellers outside the EU. Domestic online purchases are also made much more frequently than cross-border ones. In a recent survey of online consumers, domestic purchases accounted for 70% of the most recent online purchases, followed by purchases in other EU countries (12%) and outside the EU (6%). According to the scoreboard, intra-EU cross-border purchases are more popular in some of the smaller countries with language and cultural links to larger markets. The highest levels were found in Luxembourg, Austria, Malta, Finland, Denmark and Belgium, where over a third of consumers say they have made online purchases in another EU country in the past year. 

Online shopping outside the EU is most popular in Malta (24%), Finland, Luxembourg (both 18%) and the UK (17%).

While 37 % of EU retailers sell online to consumers in their own country, only 12% sell to consumers in other EU countries. This is even lower than the percentage of those who make such sales outside the EU (14%).

“Cross-border online sales are more popular in some of the smaller markets, where the domestic economy may be too small to amortise the fixed costs of developing an e-commerce infrastructure. Retailers in Iceland are the most likely to sell online to consumers in other EU countries (34 %), followed by those in Greece (24%), Malta (22%) and Ireland (21%). Some of these countries also have the highest rates of online sales to consumers outside the EU: 34% in Iceland, 22% in Greece and Croatia, 21% in Malta and Cyprus.”

The Commission’s study also finds that, at country level, preference for online sellers that also have a physical shop is the lowest in Luxembourg (21%) and Malta (23%), which could be linked to a much smaller presence of physical shops in these smaller countries. 

In Malta, Germany and Austria, almost 95% of consumers had their latest online purchase delivered at home/work, compared to less than 40% in Estonia (where a third of respondents picked up their order from a collecting point/safe box), Latvia and Finland (where the same proportion picked it up from a local post office).