Last year, PayPal published a report titled "Modern Spice Routes: The Cultural Impact of Cross-Border Shopping" (summary infographic here).

According to the report, top purchase categories for cross-border shoppers were: clothes, shoes and accessories ($12.5 billion); health and beauty products ($7.6 billion); personal electronics ($6 billion); computer hardware ($6 billion); jewellery, gems and watches ($5.8 billion); and home electronics ($5.4 billion). The main reasons for shopping online from overseas merchants are: “buying online to save money” (80%) and “more variety that cannot be found locally” (79%).

“Cross-border trade is nothing new. Our local stores are filled with goods from around the world. What is new is how easy it has become for consumers to shop online directly from merchants around the world and the massive opportunity that represents,” - David Marcus, president of PayPal.

According to this, Taiwan (Association of East Asian Relations) and Japan (Interchange Association) have reached an agreement regarding an e-commerce cooperation.

"(...) the agreement provides a mechanism to ensure safe e-commerce transactions and protect digital content. It removes trade barriers to digital products and service transactions, protects content creators' intellectual property, creates a stable and open environment that enables transactions related to information products, encourages a paperless trade across borders and prevents Internet fraud."

"The agreement also proposes to establish a platform to enable cooperation between the two countries' governments. The platform aims to encourage small- and medium-sized companies to engage in more e-commerce, as well as facilitating exchange of regulations and implementation experiences related to e-commerce."

According to new study, done by OC&C & Google, value of online exports in six of the top e-commerce markets (United States, Britain, Germany, Scandinavia, the Netherlands and France) will grow up to $130 billion by 2020 (for 2013 it was $25 billion).

"Over the next decade, online retail will become even more international. This represents a great opportunity for retailers by providing a new, capital-light approach to grow rapidly," - Anita Balchandani, OC&C.

In January 2014, China's State Administration of Taxation and the Ministry of Finance changed the conditions under which e-commerce exporters can receive an export tax exemption (or refund).

"It is hoped that the new regulations will encourage a further increase in China's cross-border e-commerce. Currently, with e-commerce often involving large quantities of small value items, businesses are unable to access tax rebates without incurring uneconomical costs."

ECC-net recently published a report entitled "Can I trust the trust mark?". "The report examines how online trust mark schemes achieve their objective of guaranteeing that their members offer good commercial practices, security and privacy for consumers."

"Earlier research has concluded that the five major concerns for e-commerce are security, privacy, unfamiliarity with services, lack of direct interaction, and credibility of information. Although these five areas are closely related, the key component must be considered to be security. In order to provide security, trust mark organisations have been described as parties that gather traders under certain criteria that are important in order to ensure a good climate for security and online shopping"

People, when shoping on-line, tend to trust more in checked sites, marks they know and buy from foreign big sites they've heard before. So, some unified form of cross-border consumer rights and knowledge of functioning of trust marks (especially for foreign sites) needs to be established.