Citizens of the newer EU member countries, such as Croatia, where people favour online shopping often have complaints of being victims of the so called 'geo-blocking' i.e. discrimination by place of residence. Some online shops often refuse to sell or deliver goods or automatically redirect the consumers to local websites with different offers and prices. Also more often than not the prices are much higher than for the consumers from some other European member countries. But the web shop evolution is on the horizon. This situation has to be changed so the European Commission introduced regulations for e-trade in order to prevent discrimination against users from some member countries in consideration to pricing and conditions of selling or paying.

''There is a single market for goods bought and sold in the real world, so there should be a single market online, too. Very often citizens do not have access to the best offers on the internet or they give up cross-border shopping due to extremely high delivery price or uncertainty of their rights,'' said Andrus Ansip a Vice President of the European Commission for the Digital Single Market.

According to Biljana Bronzan a Croatian representative in the European Parliament every fourth customer has complaints about online shopping. ''Almost 25 percent of the European consumers have complaints about being unable to buy items online from other countries. The fact is that cross-border online shopping accounts for only 14 percent of the total internet shopping. The consumer associations estimate that a delivery to the smaller European member countries costs twice as much as to the bigger member countries. On the other hand, this market has great potential and would greatly benefit Croatian retailers and customers as well. According to some estimates an increase in online shopping by 10 percent would lead to a growth of GDP in the EU by 1.7 percent,'' commented Bronzan.