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By the end of the year, the B2C e-commerce business in Italy will approach 39 billion with an expected growth of 6% while, overall, penetration will remain stable at 11% compared to total purchases. The best performing sectors will be those of food and grocery, automotive and spare parts, furniture which should achieve growth between 8 and 12% while for personal care and beauty, IT, consumer electronics and clothing a range is expected between 5 and 7%. These are the forecasts according to the latest survey of the Netcomm B2c eCommerce Observatory – School of Management of the Polytechnic of Milan presented on the occasion of the opening plenary of the nineteenth edition of Netcomm Forum – the reference event for the digital world on the themes of 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 metaverses to space commerce”.
A market that is affected by the difficult economic cycle but despite everything is used by 33.7 million Italian consumers who received 186 million packages in the first quarter, with a +13.5% on the same period of the previous year.
«If the B2c eCommerce market in Italy continues to record constant growth, as does the number of digital buyers in our country, which today are 33.7 million, in this edition of Netcomm Forum we also asked ourselves at what point are Italian companies and how many companies have their own e-commerce site – explains Roberto Liscia, president of Netcomm -. To date, there are 88 thousand, the majority of which (18.6%) are located in Lombardy, Lazio (12.1%) and Campania (12%). We also observed that 24.5% of companies that have their own e-commerce site record a high and medium-high degree of internationalization compared to the 9.7% of others recorded at a national level. It is clear, however, that internationalization is a development lever on which a lot of 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 which monitors the volumes of e-Commerce shipments in Italy, 186 million parcels were sent as a result of online purchases in the first quarter of 2024, on the increase by 13.5% compared to the same period in 2023. The figure is driven by purchases in the fashion & sport sector (23.3%), followed by IT and consumer electronics (18.4%) and health and 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 analyzed have at least one social network. Facebook is the most widespread followed by Instagram (76.2%), YouTube (21.1%), Linkedin (18.1%) and Twitter (17.3%). 78.8% of companies have their own website e-commerce offers more than one payment method: specifically, 20.8% have 2 payment methods, 28% have 3 and 30% have 4 or more. Among companies with only one payment method, 47.7% adopt PayPal, 33.54% the possibility of paying by credit card and 10.37% by bank transfer.
«In 2024, the B2C product e-commerce market will continue to grow by approximately 2.2 billion compared to 2023, albeit at a slower pace. The increase will go from +9% 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 omnichannel, the use of extended reality and the offer of value-added logistics services. Followed by Auto and Spare Parts (+10%). Of note is the recovery of food&grocery (+8%) after the decline recorded in 2023 (-2%)” adds Valentina Pontiggia, director of the B2c Netcomm e-commerce observatory – Polytechnic of Milan.