B2c e-commerce towards 39 billion

By the end of the year, the B2C e-commerce business in Italy will be close to EUR 39 billion, with expected growth of 6%, while overall penetration will remain stable at 11% of total purchases. The best-performing sectors will be food and grocery, automotive and spare parts, and furnishings, which are expected to grow by between 8 and 12%, while personal care and beauty, IT, consumer electronics and clothing are expected to grow by between 5 and 7%. These are the forecasts according to the latest survey by the Netcomm B2C eCommerce Observatory - School of Management of the Politecnico di Milano presented at the opening plenary of the 19th edition of Netcomm Forum - the reference event for the digital world on the evolution of eCommerce, digital retail and business innovation entitled "The intelligence commerce: composable & fluid, the continuous re-configuration of retail and supply chains. Retail: from metaverse to space commerce'.

A market that suffers from the difficult economic cycle but is nevertheless used by 33.7 million Italian consumers who received 186 million parcels in the first quarter, an increase of 13.5% over the same period last year.

"If the B2c eCommerce market in Italy continues to grow steadily, as does the number of digital buyers in our country, which now stands at 33.7 million, at this edition of Netcomm Forum we also asked ourselves how many Italian companies have their own e-commerce site," explains Roberto Liscia, president of Netcomm. To date, there are 88,000, most of which (18.6%) are in Lombardy, Lazio (12.1%) and Campania (12%). We have observed, moreover, that 24.5% of the companies that have their own e-commerce site record a high and medium-high degree of internationalisation compared to 9.7% of the others recorded nationally. It is clear, however, that internationalisation is a development lever on which much work still needs to be done: almost 63% of Italian companies that have their own e-commerce site still have a low or medium-low degree of internationalisation, and the percentage rises to over 82% for Italian companies'.

According to the latest edition of the Delivery Index, the annual research by Netcomm in collaboration with Poste Italiane that monitors the volumes of e-Commerce shipments in Italy, 186 million parcels will be sent as a result of online purchases in the first quarter of 2024, an increase of 13.5% compared to the same period in 2023. Driving the figure are fashion & sports purchases (23.3%), followed by IT & consumer electronics (18.4%) and health & beauty (17.6%). The research also shows that 8 out of 10 online purchases take place on the platforms of one of the 10 most popular merchants with publishing being the category with the highest percentage (95.4%) of purchases on the channels of the top merchants in the sector. Almost 80% of the companies analysed have at least one social network. Facebook is the most popular followed by Instagram (76.2%), YouTube (21.1%), Linkedin (18.1%) and Twitter (17.3%).78.8% of companies with their own e-commerce site offer more than one payment method: specifically, 20.8% have 2 payment methods, 28% have 3 and 30% have 4 or more. Among the companies with only one payment method, 47.7% adopt PayPal, 33.54% the possibility to pay by credit card and 10.37% by bank transfer.

"In 2024, the B2c product e-commerce market will continue to grow by about 2.2 billion over 2023, albeit at a slower pace. The increase will go from +9% in the previous year to +6% this year. The best-performing sector in 2024 will be Furniture and Home Living (+12%), supported by innovations in user experience, in particular omnichanneling, the use of extended reality and value-added logistics services. Auto and Parts followed (+10%). Of note is the recovery of food & grocery (+8%) after the drop recorded in 2023 (-2%)," adds Valentina Pontiggia, director of the B2c Netcomm - Politecnico di Milano e-commerce Observatory.