Investigating how online shopping platform users contribute to improving the businesses’ performance: empirical evidence from Romania

The purpose of this paper is to identify how online shopping platform users in Romania influence businesses’ performance. The emergence of e-commerce has led to a revolution in global commerce by diversifying and improving sales and purchasing actions for existing products and services on the market. In Romania, buyers’ behaviour shows a more restraining of online commerce behaviour. Most sales are still registered according to the classic system of physically going to stores, although the number of online users has grown significantly over the last decade. The reluctance of buyers to buy from the online environment leads to the low performance of companies in the e-commerce market. The hypothesized model is empirically tested using data collected from a survey on Google Analytics platforms of some online companies in Romania. The authors used SPSS Software to examine the reliability and validity of the measurement model. There have been analysed various links between some variables that were obtained from Google Analytics, data that were collected by age groups, gender or geographical area. Through an empirical analysis is being analysed the role of tracking data on the websites in order to improve company performance. By analysing those variables, the authors analysed if the number of sessions acquired, the bounce rate of the acquired visitors or other variables can improve the company performance. This study offers a new perspective on company performance in online firms. The analysis of variables describing user behaviour in the online environment in interaction with e-commerce platforms has led to conclusions about the performance of online companies. The theoretical contributions and managerial implications of the study are discussed.