Greece

Since social shopping is not yet available in Greece, the closest example to that is through Instagram were clicking the right icon (see the Instagram shopping bag in the image below) transfers users to the same environment as the one that will enable purchasing when social shopping feature becomes available.

• The shopping bag image (circled in the image below) indicates the social shopping environment.
• Image of the selected product.
• Blue frame that directs you to the e-shop. When social shopping feature will be available in Greece, this frame will display the payment button.
• E-shop interface, where buyer can – for the time being – complete their payment and purchase.

Source: Instagram.com

Romania

Study case

You are a knitting accessories vendor, and COVID-19 forced people to stay in the house. Μany people have tried to spend their time with various hobbies, one of them being knitting. Many people, like you, decided to attempt to sell their products and goods online.

In the case of Romania, the first three search results for such online marketplaces that appeared are: Alibaba, Made in China, Amazon.de

Source: https://www.alibaba.com/

Poland

The pandemic has increased interest in online shopping at an unprecedented rate. As the market for e-commerce companies becomes more competitive, they must meet the new expectations of an increasing number of online shoppers. Poles are increasingly shopping online due to convenience, the ease of finding better deals online, and lower prices.

InPost Sp. z o.o. – (https://inpost.pl/) Poles place a high value on the convenience and low cost of delivery when purchasing products on the Internet. Inpost parcel pick-up station machines are a popular delivery method. Inpost is the first company in Poland to set up a network of parcel pick – up station machines and collection points that are open 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Machines are near housing estates and shops. The company constantly grows, focusing on expanding services, dedicated to online shops. E-commerce is supported by Inpost through modern solutions such as Courier Packages for Businesses and shop integrations, and Fulfillment.  The InPost Mobile app with remote box opening at the (self-service) parcel pick-up station was launched in 2019. The app is available for free download from the app stores.

Ceneo.pl sp. z o.o. – (https://www.ceneo.pl/) is the most widely used price comparison engine on the Polish Internet. Ceneo is a marketing tool that allows you to find appealing exclusive offers for the products you select so that you can buy them at the lowest prices possible. Users are automatically shown special offers at the top of the page. When you click on the product of your choice, you will be taken to a page with all the offers from various shops for that specific product. Each offer includes information about the shop’s rating and reviews. You will also learn whether the shop offers free shipping and the opinions of people who have purchased the item.

Scotland

Marks and Spencer Group plc is a major British multinational retailer with headquarters in London. It was one of the first three companies to participate in the pilot phase of Instagram shopping in the UK.

Users can click on tags on retailers’ Instagram posts to go directly to their website to purchase the item. They can also access the entire list on Instagram, without visiting the official website. The products are accompanied by a detailed description. Thus, they can also see products in combination.

Source: Instagram Post of Marksandspencer

Slovenia

In the recent years, social media have become increasingly important. That is why influencers are also extremely important. They regularly post a variety of content on social media, creating a large crowd of followers who closely follow their lives, advice and views. They are important for advertising various brands. The number of influencers has increased significantly also in Slovenia – one of the main influencers is Lea Filipovič (Lepa Afna). She uses YouTube and Instagram. She has got around 108,000 followers on her Instagram profile, which is a very large number for Slovenia. The videos are related to cosmetics, fashion, travel and lifestyle. Through her posts, she advertises many products of various Slovenian companies. In recent years she has created quite a few of her own collections, which she also successfully sells with the help of posts on Instagram. Among other things, she has created several school collections, which tells us a lot about her target audience: teenagers, whom she focuses on school collections, as well as women between the ages of 18 and 35, whom she targets with makeup posts and collaborations with cosmetics companies (Nabernik, 2021).

Another example is PJU, which has researched in practice how to increase sales with influencer marketing. The full content can be found here: https://pju.si/ (PJU, 2022).