The EU's Digital Single Market: Obstacles and Opportunities for New Business Endeavors

Digital Single Market in Europe plays an important role in e-commerce of the European Union. The Digital Agenda for Europe (2010) and the Digital Single Market Strategy (2015) are the key elements in shaping it. This paper’s aim is to analyse if the European Union (EU) have reached the stated in the documents goals and which problems as well as new opportunities were created by them. The research uses statistics about leader companies on the EU’s market in 13 different digital business models to examine the real effect of the Digital Single Market Strategy on companies and growth of them and to find the most common business models. Analysis of existing documents and papers from previous years is used to identify changes in volume of e-commerce in European Union as well as newly appeared obstacles for new business endeavours. Digital Single Market was a partly successfully implemented initiative, but barrier of meeting the requirements for data protection was difficult and significant for many companies. Content and Commerce digital business models are the most common ones among European firms and the DSM did not prevent their growth and development. Key words: e-commerce; EU; Digital Single Market; digital business models