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This paper aims to consider the question of changes brought to consumers’ trust and security issues by the implementation of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in electronic commerce.

Online shopping policies in Poland and Ukraine are compared from the perspective of four factors as follows: application of terms of service and privacy policy, usage of online payment systems, presence in price comparison engines and grade of secure sockets layer security certificates. Comparison is conducted within the framework of three research questions (complemented by eight hypotheses) set to reveal whether: policies of personal data protection and server security for online stores in both countries are the same; all online stores in both countries obey the existing e-commerce rules; e-commerce policies in the two countries differ significantly. The sample for analysis contains 40 Polish and 40 Ukrainian online stores, representing four industries, namely, electronics, entertainment, fashion and goods for children.

The research allowed to reveal major differences in the privacy policy of the two countries, caused, mainly, by the absence of GDPR in Ukraine. It also disclosed much stronger cooperation of online stores and price comparison engines in Poland compared to Ukraine. At the same time, research results allow to state that server security in both countries is on the same rather high level and that online stores use transparent and safe methods of online payment.

This research opens a way to other, expanded observations which will include more countries and larger scopes of data. Its main limitation is that GDPR influence is only studied in two countries, not in all countries where it is implemented.

This research contributes from security and trust perspectives by analyzing the situation in two countries as follows: the EU member (Poland) and a non-EU country (Ukraine). The value of exploring the situation of Ukrainian e-commerce consists of understanding how online stores function without implementing the GDPR. Observation of shopbots application allows drawing an important conclusion of the necessity for online stores to cooperate with such services. It was also revealed that consumers’ trust in both countries depends a lot on the payment methods applied by an online store and on the ease of use of these methods.

This research focuses on the analysis of the recommendation algorithms employed by Google Discover, utilizing data from two e-commerce platforms operating in Poland.

The study uses the information obtained from Google Search Console in a time span of 17 months. The examination of Google Discover focuses on the number of displays, clicks and click-through ratio, from the viewpoints of content publishers and web users.

The results suggest that user engagement positively influences a website’s efficiency in Google Discover, yet the algorithm also considers variables such as the popularity of similar content on other websites, user location and content update frequency. Thus, a website may be excluded from Discover despite a substantial click count.

There is a lack of studies on how Google Discover is perceived by users based on real data. We offer a quantitative perspective, which has not yet been done. This study offers an overview of the history and evolution of Google Discovery, an overview of data we used to show the perception of the service, and two unique perspectives on recommender service, users and publishers.