The Influence of Web 2.0 Tools on E-Commerce Sustainable Development: Empirical Evidence from European Union Countries

In the context of accelerating digitalization, this article investigates how electronic commerce performance is influenced by Web 2.0 instruments in the 27 EU member states. Analyzing the existing literature review and performing a bibliometric review, there was identified a gap related with measurable economic results of e-commerce. The scope of this paper is to analyze the relationship between Web 2.0 tools and the level of turnover generated by e-commerce, applying robust econometric models based on panel data regression with Random effects and with fixed effects (Arellano-Bond). The results highlight that online paid advertisement and social media usage variables have significative, positive effect on e-commerce performance, confirming the first and second hypothesis. Use of enterprise's blog or microblogs and use of multimedia content sharing websites do not influence enterprises' total turnover from e-commerce sales to a valid and statistically significant extent. Thus, the third and fourth hypotheses are not confirmed by the results of the research conducted, possibly due to limited innovation and platform ownership in Europe region. The study makes a notable empirical and methodological contribution, embedding the digital sustenability in the analysis, which implies that the findings can be used for updating e-commerce policies.