BBVA big data on online credit card transactions : the patterns of domestic and cross-border e-commerce

This report uses a standard gravity setup to analyse the determinants of e-commerce, using data on online credit card payments by private Spanish customers of the multinational bank BBVA. The results show that the gravity model applies well to credit card payments, explaining up to 95% of the variation in the data. The analysis finds potentially large border effects for trade between any two regions or countries, implying that individuals tend to purchase more from their home region or domestically than from other places. The estimates also suggest that the effect of distance might be slightly less important for e-commerce transactions than for offline trade, although the death of distance hypothesis is clearly rejected by the data.