Online Communication and E-Commerce Dynamics in the European Union. A Consumer-Based Approach

The European Union has settled facilitating transactions within a single market as a primary aim. Consumers’ rights and protecting their safety are priorities for the European Union, alleging a partnership between member states and citizens. National legal systems represent the first problem in applying European rules because contract laws are different in many aspects, as many authors posit. The interest of this paper is finding out if consumers consider themselves well-informed, and which are the main channels used with a view to feeling comfortable and to trusting European market dynamics. Consumers’ opinions about the efficiency of online communication have a double impact on the social spectrum: being adaptive or being repellent. Hereby, the research questions mark the importance of online communication in delineating economic transactions. Our approach is from a social-cognitive perspective, acknowledging the importance of behavioral communication in economic boundaries. The environment in which consumers work or spend spare time determines and influences their acts, attitudes and social behavior. In order to understand how consumers’ look at the European Union’s interest in being more open to citizens and to how their social behavior in online area can mark the way consumers react to European goods, we resorted to a qualitative research, with in-depth interviews. Investigating the bond between consumers’ trust and consumers’ acts in acquiring European services brings into light the fact that communication remains unavoidable and compulsory for gaining citizens’ credential regardless of the frame of reference.