A Cluster Analysis Concerning the Behavior of Enterprises with E-Commerce Activity in the Context of the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

The planning of activities of e-commerce enterprises and their behavior has been influenced by the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic. The behavior of e-commerce enterprises has been highlighted at the level of EU countries through an analysis elaborated on four variables: the value of e-commerce sales, cloud computing services, enterprises that have provided training to develop/upgrade the ICT skills of their personnel, e-commerce, customer relationship management (CRM) and secure transactions. Using the hierarchical clustering method, analysis was carried out on these variables to identify certain economic and behavioral patterns of e-commerce activity from 2018 and 2020. The study of the relationships involved in the e-commerce activity of these enterprises is reflected in models of the economic behavior of 31 European states in relation to the targeted variables. The results show that the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic are strongly manifested in the direction of the evolution of each indicator but differ from one country to another. The trends depend on the level of development and the particularities of each country’s economy in adapting to the repercussions reported in relation to the level of impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. This is highlighted by the significant regrouping of countries in 2020 compared with 2018 in relation to the average values of the indicators. The results show that, in 2020, the most significant percentages of the value of e-commerce sales were recorded in Belgium, Ireland and Czechia, as in 2018. In e-commerce, customer relationship management and secure transactions, Denmark and Sweden were superior in 2020 to the countries mentioned above, which were dominant in 2018. For the other two indicators, Finland and Norway were the top countries included in the analysis in both years. The conclusion supports the continuous model of e-commerce enterprise behavior in order to meet the requirements of online customers.