Economics and Marketing of E-Commerce at 0 km and Further on the Path Towards S-Commerce

E-commerce gives evidence of the contemporary economics of attention, when consumers virtually reveal their preferences everywhere and for everything. Social media, above all, amplify attention, opportunities, markets, shopping, rankings and, as a consequence, economic growth. Web domains and social media enable consumers’ experiences from information flows to persuasion and from shopping to international trade (Nadeem et al., Int J Inform Manage 35(4):432–442, 2015; Verhoef et al., J Retail 91(2):174–181, 2015; Xu et al., J Mark 78(4):97–112, 2014). Boundaries of economies are vanishing thanks to this e-market for everything and everyone. E-commerce evolves into social commerce (s-commerce), when relationships grow together with transactions and economic performances. Who, what and where of e-commerce get into global and challenging features of s-commerce. Marketing, and especially social media marketing, therefore, has a crucial new role and enhances ‘interactive online world’ in which ‘participants with different interests, resources and power cocreate value’ (Kornum and Mühlbacher, J Bus Res 66(9):1460–1464, 2013). Nowadays, consumers are spending more time than ever using social media, and organisations are striving to use social media to reach, engage, catch and hold the millions of consumers who use it daily (Parsons, Allied academies international conference: proceedings of the academy of marketing studies, 16(2):11–15, 2011). After analysing the new marketing scenario and pointing out social media marketing strategies, this paper investigates EU27 for e-commerce performances, exports, imports, trade balance and gross domestic product (GDP) growth as concerns the latest 2010–2015 European Statistics. Thanks to cluster analysis, separating groups will emerge with different growth according to e-commerce performances.