Impact of external factors on e-commerce market in cities and its implications on environment

The e-commerce market in cities is currently one of the fastest-growing markets. By observing the current changes taking place in it, we have a unique opportunity to learn about its potential development directions in the future with great acceleration. Some of the recent changes caused by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic have a chance to affect this market's development in the coming years permanently. The paper's primary purpose is to identify relationships between factors that could significantly impact sustainable e-commerce development in cities, mainly including environmental issues, on the example of the European Union Countries. For this purpose, five groups of factors (criteria), based on literature, were selected: e-commerce drivers (Internet and mobile access, macroeconomic conditions and social aspects in the country), criteria describing the e-commerce market in cities, and criteria that assess the impact of the development of the e-commerce market in cities on the environment were assessed. According to the authors' proposal, the relationships between these groups of factors were verified, taking into account the network model of connections. For this purpose, the multi-criteria decision-making method with the use of the PROMETHEE technique has been applied. The research results presented in the paper confirmed that the relations between the analyzed groups of criteria are complex. In most countries, high positions in the rankings containing criteria describing the so-called drivers of the e-commerce market also translate into high places in the order describing this market's development. At the same time, those countries where the e-commerce activity in cities is high present lower environmental conditions.