We’ll help you to localise your digital marketing strategy for the Romanian market. Tell us about your export business goals and we’ll give you a hand in market sizing, digital marketing cost estimation, business plan validation and an action plan for achieving success in the Romanian market.
Romania
as your next market for growthGrow your business in Romania
Expand beyond borders and beyond your expectations. Grab a hold of this soon-to be 6.5 billion dollar e-commerce market hungry for quality.
Tired of a tight competitor game? Looking for a space where growth and visibility are still a viable option? Romania might just be the market for you. A country where millennials took over online shopping, mobile-first penetration is the highest across the globe and Black Friday comes multiple times a year, builds a solid ground for experienced players to reap the rewards of what they learnt so far. We are definitely not saying it will be easy to succeed in one of Europe’s fastest growing markets (30% annually), but smart, dedicated efforts as well as an insider knowledge of country-specific digital marketing context will potentially get you a fair share of that metaphorical pie.
Country in a snapshot
Romania is a land of super fast internet and incredibly high mobile penetration (76 %). Most online orders are done by millennials and the vast majority still prefers to pay cash on pick-up. Clothes, home and electro are the three biggest categories – pandemic confirmed. Romanians like small luxuries, demand free shipping as well as an in-person contact (get your phone charged and ready!) and fairly enjoy writing reviews. Keep them satisfied and you have more coming in!
It is also the country with the world’s most beautiful driving road, according to Top Gear, a surprising birthplace of coffee culture (illy founder was born in Timisoara) and the fifth booziest country (you can bond over a beer!) but we suspect you came for the actual e-com insights.
Let’s hear them!
On the graph you can see the relative change of Google ads cost and CPC of e‑commerce players.
E-commerce growth, leaders and trends
Rightly on the lookout of many online store founders and retailers, Romania’s e-commerce grows by 30 % annually and is expected to continue growing significantly till 2025 and beyond. Given the recent changes caused by pandemic, online shopping in Eastern and Southeastern Europe will have a higher share in total retail sales within the next 5 years, while Romania will experience the fastest dynamics in this regard, according to Business Review.
What segments are typically bought online? Unlike CEE, where electronics is traditionally the number one, Romania’s largest e-commerce industry is fashion. Clothes, footwear and accessories account for 40% of the online retail revenue in the country. It is followed by electro / IT, food and personal care, toys and DIY and home and decor.
9 908 000
Number of online shoppers
52%
Online shoppers compared to population
30000
Number of shops
€9.95bn
E‑commerce revenue (2023)
8%
E‑commerce growth
When it comes to the biggest players, eMAG is one to rule them all. The largest marketplace in the Southeastern region, eMAG sets the pace, ways and trends. The store had a total revenue of 604 million USD in 2019 (for comparison, fashiondays.ro and dedeman.ro had scored second and third with around 80 million USD). Popular and powerful, if this marketplace decides there’s Black Friday twice (or even multiple times) a year, it simply is so.
One thing you need to know about Romanian e-commerce: it revolves around Black Friday sales and bargains. Black Friday typically comes before the actual American one (due to bank holidays around that time in Romania), and typically continues throughout the year. The sales multiplies during those seasons, making Black Friday the biggest e-commerce event, larger than Christmas and all.
Another strong set of stores are Altrex and Domo (both offer everything from electro to skin care, supplements and car parts), Flanco (also segment non-specific but with an extra focus on electronics) and Okazii (fashion, books, phones etc.). In terms of electro / IT, you want to remember names like Astratex, NOD as well as all above mentioned stores. When it comes to home and deco, Glami, Bonami, Favi, Dedeman and Vivre are your go-tos. For fashion, check Fashion Days and Spartoo. The biggest players run their businesses mostly from Bucharest with foreign-owned brands driving their logistics from outside the borders all while keeping up with domestic shops.
Customers
The largest segment of online shoppers is made up of the younger generations between 25-35 of age. “These generations are known to be tech-savvy, service oriented and speed driven. Large part of e-commerce is backed by this generation that prefers to shop online,” CBRE report states. For millennials and gen Z’s, online shopping is a lifestyle, an experience. Online stores, social media and apps are places where borders don’t exist and everything suddenly becomes available.
This might actually be connected – did you know Romania had the peak internet speed of 131 Mbps, which makes it the 5th nation with the fastest internet in the world?
Regardless of how enchanted of the possibilities they are, deeper and more personal contact is crucial to gain a Romanian customer. Trust is built with locals when they know you have a showroom in their city or country, where they can see the product (even if they end up having it delivered at home). Pick-up points are becoming popular for similar reasons. If you don’t have a showroom, it still helps to let them know you are an established company: do show your premises on a localized website, offer a native speaking customer support together with a local phone number and set up a local collection point for refunds (if your industry asks for it).
The online shopping cycle takes place on their phones (Romanians basically skipped the desktop, although sometimes finish their purchase on a computer). Optimize your website for mobile-first. And be serious about that customer support. A typical Romanian customer prefers phone contact to chat or email day in and day out. “In some cases, 50% of the orders came via phone calls. It is a challenge from an analytics point of view (right attribution) but also a big opportunity to boost your sales conversions with quality customer support,” László Szábó, co-founder of Growww Digital experienced. Interestingly enough, Romanians fairly enjoy writing reviews. They also hang out on Facebook.
Product-wise, cool, well-renowned or love brands are an equivalent of status, which is especially true for high-end, luxury items like phones or clothes. Romanians love small luxuries almost as much as they love bargains. They’re all for brands from abroad as they bring access to something new and fresh, but they check it twice. Certificates or licenses are recommended to guarantee the quality of your product. Romanian have historically been flooded with fakes from Turkey or Italy being sold as the real deal, so meet them halfway.
How to get their attention:
Ecosystem
Logistics is no longer a pain point for companies shipping to Romanian market. While the infrastructure might have been slowing businesses down just a couple of years ago, massive growth of the industrial and logistics real estate submarket, led by demand in automotive and FMCG, resulted in couriers guaranteeing D+2 delivery from the Czech Republic and other CEE countries.
FAN Courier, DPD, Zasilkovna, Urgent Cargus and Someday Courier are some of the most common players, with Romanian post being a popular option too. Industry leaders like eMAG have their own.
Legislation / administration. Legislation tends to change with a bit of a higher frequency than in other CEE countries, where e-commerce is already covered in the law system. If you have a brick-and-mortar, take inspections into account. VAT registration is compulsory after you hit 220 000 RON in revenue (standard VAT is 20 %, groceries or medication are 9 %, books and magazines 5 %).
Payment. Majority prefers to pay cash on pick-up. The actual numbers vary depending on sources but it is safe to say that somewhere between two thirds to 90 % of Romanians pay in cash when picking up their orders. About 10 % use cards, 3 % e-methods like PayPal or Klarna.
Home delivery. Nine out of ten rely on the good old post or courier to bring their package right to their door, although collection and pick-up are on the rise. Important: there are no ZIP codes in Romania, or better yet they aren’t frequently used. If you want couriers to deliver your packages, always sign them in this order: recipient’s first name, surname, phone, email, address: street name, house number / entrance number, floor, flat number, county/district, city, city part.
Candid insights before we go on:
While most of the online store’s founders calendars (and lives!) revolve around Christmas in CEE, Romania’s Black Friday madness will add one, two or more peaks to that busy season.
Deep dive into digital marketing
Romania is such an interesting country when it comes to acquiring customers. Their shopping mentality is a unique blend of demand for generic products to be fast and affordable. Or better yet, at a discounted price. Btw did you know Black Friday comes multiple times a year in Romania? That says a lot! On the other hand, there is an insatiable appetite for a variety of fresh choices, small luxuries and even high-end products. Wanna win? Respond with marketing channels and tools blended accordingly.
“No matter if you want to run highly optimized PPC ads or build your brand through social media and informative content, we’ll come up with the ideal, country specific strategy that can best serve your needs and goals. Our clients have grown on average by 84 % in the last 5 years.”
– László Szabó, Google Certified Trainer for Export in CEE.
PPC Advertising
Our number one tip before you spend any money on marketing? Fail in your Excel sheet. Lean and agile is the way for many companies, but that doesn’t mean to blindly fail fast in order to optimize later. “We believe businesses exporting abroad need to focus on growth first. Calculate your business potential and go for the low hanging fruit. After all, it’s best to plan ahead and make your first mistakes in an Excel sheet,” László Szabó, Google Certified Trainer for Export in the Czech Republic and Slovakia believes.
He rightly places PPC amongst the lowest hanging fruits. Google Ads, Google Shopping and Facebook Ads campaigns. “As a results-first focused agency with senior specialists native in 6 CEE languages, we’ve seen the power localised campaigns can bring to an exporting business, even if it’s a first-timer,” Zoltán Flékács, Head of Performance explains what they do at Growww Digital, and what you want to be doing too.
Apart from PPC, Google Shopping entered Romania in 2019. According to Flékács, it is the single most effective way to enter a country with just a minimum level of localisation that can be done by any PPC professional not even speaking the language. “Shopping is the quickest win of them all,” he knows from experience, “and when it comes to Google Shopping, activating the 20% discount on CPC by a CSS/CSP provider is a no-brainer from a business point of view. It is an advantage not used by many so you might as well go right ahead and outperform local players if you have Google Shopping international experience.”
Facebook, when executed well, is one of the most performing channels in Romania today, especially with a visually appealing product. It works wonders in fashion, home and decor, or in our experience anything from lighting to electronic goods,” Alexandra Mezei, Head of Brand and Social Media at Growww Digital elaborates. Gmail retargeting as well as retargeting similar audiences on Facebook are a key part of a successful PPC strategy.
Price Comparison Shopping Optimization
Apart from being a tool for you to get a peek into how established stores (and your competitors!) do e-commerce, marketplace marketing can be a door-opener. We mentioned eMAG from the industry leadership point of view. It is also a biggest marketplace, aka a possible entry point for your brand is one to rule them all. According to Flékacs, being present on eMAG is a great introduction strategy for segments typically performing well on such sites. Selling on an established and trustworthy website reinforces your image as a reliable partner. It comes with a price (approx. 15% commission), as well time and administration to set it. You are also giving away 100% autonomy over your pricing, branding, content, visual and other business decisions.
On the contrary, it is one of the fastest, most hands-on ways to get a touch and feel of Romanian market. Other websites comparing products across segments and categories are Compari, Price.ro, Shopmania and Biano. When it comes to home and deco, Glami, Bonami and Favi are your go-tos.
SEO
Review your content and technical search engine optimization. We recommend having your technical (off-page) SEO centralized, meaning it is set in the same way across countries you export to. Make sure you localize off-site link building to Romanian pages. On-site wording and localization is a must. “With our in-house senior experts native in 5 CEE languages (including Romanian), we translate and localise your site’s metadata, while our proven local link building partners help to maximize the link juice to your sites. All of this to ensure long-term organic traffic and conversions,” Zoltán summarizes what steps would follow. Having a localized version of your store, in LEI and in Romanian language will enable you to have your store indexed in Romanian search engines.
Social Media & Brand Communication
PPC, although powerful in gaining momentum, is one of the most expensive ways to grow a business in the long run. Why? According to Szabó, you don’t want to be dependent on just a few platforms (Google and Facebook), especially such giants you don’t own or can’t control.
In short, you want to build brand awareness. This process has several steps from having a localized website showing your brand’s DNA to digital communication across channels, remarketing users, retention campaigns, all the way to building communities. “Start by analyzing both numbers (traffic / following, engagement, conversions) and the quality of your content,” Alexandra Mezei recommends. your end goal would probably be sparking consumer’s interest, building trust and loyalty. Focus on texts, link building, tone of voice, photos and videos and what works for you in other markets. How could your communication strategy look like? According to Alexandra’s experience with building multiple brand strategies across Europe, you want to stay close to 70 % educational content or sparking desire, 30 % sales content with calls to actions.
Content Creation
Content marketing means creating regular content that your audience finds useful, interesting, relevant and entertaining. It further boosts your brand goals. The whole communication is strongly tied to your business goals. Content done well doesn’t mean doing it all, and certainly not all at the same time. Building a well-oiled content machine means you build systems: focus on a coherent message told through one or two channels. Tell it and re-tell it again and again using the wheel of content formula. One idea can be easily written as a blog post, and then iterated into newsletters, posts, videos, audios and other content beyond owned platforms (influencers, media and publications). In other words, you show up for your customers consistently so they show up for you when it comes to making a purchasing decision.
In terms of channels, Facebook is definitely the number one social media platform in Romania. “Surprisingly, WhatsApp is also very popular and in terms of chatting, it is far more popular than Messenger, and it also allows launching ads,” Growww Digital’s Brigitta Vanya recommends, “Instagram is commonly used by the younger generation and TikTok is already very strong in Romania and will increase in usage, too.”
Conclusion and (your) next steps
There’s no sugar coding this: you want to be in Romania because if you look left or right, it is the biggest opportunity in Europe nowadays: a high growth market that is not too saturated.
Sure, Romania is interesting in general, with the younger generation at the steering wheel, mobile shopping and other peculiarities (perhaps you do want to go down that world’s most beautiful road after all), but what really matters is the business potential e-commerce entails. And according to our experience, Romanian market is one of the drivers of growth during expansion.
Make your first step towards visibility on Romanian market today: join a Facebook mastermind for committed exporters, or get in touch with us if you need help with export. And if you know precisely what help you need in any area of digital marketing, talk to us directly and we will create a tailored offer that boosts your business results.