Analytics, Estonia, Financial Services, Internet, Markets and Companies, Society, Technology

There has been a notable increase in the number of online purchases made using a bank link or a bankcard lately. A bank link was used 49,000 times a day to make payments in the first quarter of 2016.

The Bank of Estonia has been collecting statistics on the use of bank link since 2012, when a bank link was used for 30,000 purchases a day. A bank link can only be used for purchases from Estonian online stores, which according to the Estonian E-Commerce Association number approximately 2,000 at this point. It is also possible to pay by bankcard in many online stores, but only 1,000 card purchases are made in Estonian online stores daily, a notably smaller number than the number of purchases made using a bank link.

Purchases from foreign merchants using a bankcard were made an the average 20,000 times a day in the first quarter of 2016, three times as much as in 2012.

The average size of a payment by bank link was 51 euros and the average size of an online card payment was 49 euros in the first quarter of 2016. Card purchases in Estonian online stores averaged 66 euros, which is notably more than the average bank link payment. There is also a difference between the size of the average payment made with a debit card and a credit card, the average debit card payment being 43 euros and the average credit card payment 59 euros.

The rapid growth in online shopping is also reflected in the data of Statistics Estonia. The number of retail merchants was 3% bigger in 2015 than in 2014 and the turnover of companies whose main business is retail by mail or online retail increased by 35%. At 2.6% in 2015, up from 2% in 2014, their turnover however remained modest when measured as a share of the total retail turnover.

One million domestic payments on the average, with a total value of 352 million euros, were made in Estonia per day in the first quarter of 2016. While the number of payments was 5.3% bigger than in the first quarter of last year, the turnover was smaller by 4.7%.