Italian B2C eCommerce generated €32.4 billion in 2020

The results and new trends in the development of digital commerce in Italy were presented at the Netcomm Forum. The shopping basket strongly favours the products category (+45% on 2019).

The latest report from the B2C eCommerce Monitor - Netcomm School of Management of Milan Polytechnic, unveiled during the 16th edition of the Netcomm Forum, took stock of the state of e-commerce in Italy and revealed a 3.4% increase in online purchases in 2020 to €32.4 billion. While growth had been expected, the results exceeded all expectations.

The dynamic was largely driven by the pandemic and saw a divergent trend between the products sector, which grew by 45% to €25.9 billion, and that of online services, which fell by 52% to €6.5 billion.

The dramatic growth in product purchases resulted in an €8 billion year-on-year increase in sales, driven by IT and Consumer Electronics (+€1.9 billion), Food & Grocery (+€1.3 billion) and Furniture & Home Living (+€1.1 billion).

More generally, the percentage of online purchases as a share of total retail sales increased significantly from 7% in 2019 to 9% in 2020 due to the slump in offline purchases caused by Covid-related restrictions.

The eCommerce value chain in Italy

According to the Netcomm survey conducted by The European House - Ambrosetti, companies in the digital retail value chain in Italy generated total revenues of €58.6 billion in 2020 and accounted for 34% of the total number of companies (680,000).

In 2019, prior to the outbreak of the pandemic, e-commerce was already one of the sectors seeing the biggest increase in share of total revenues and was having a significant impact both on the growth in revenues from total economic activities (+19.2%) and the increase in employment on the part of Italian companies (6.7% of the total).

In 2020, businesses that made partial or complete use of the digital sales network saw significant growth in their sales and e-commerce revenues. During the lockdown, 50% of merchants and brand reported a more than 100% increase in online sales revenues, while 50% of business partners saw growth of between +21% and +75%.

The evolution of consumers and their purchasing behaviour in 2021

A Netcomm survey conducted in collaboration with MagNews into the transformation of consumer purchasing patterns between 2020 and 2021 in the Fashion, Food and Personal Care sectors identified five new categories of users (Contemporary Consumer, Fast Shopper, Offline Buyer, Omnichannel Shopper and Digital First).

The biggest trend is a consistent shift in purchasing behaviour from a predominantly physical or omnichannel approach to one of Digital First (online-only shopping).

According to the survey, the Digital Consumers category has seen significant growth in online purchases in all three areas since 2020: from 2% to 12.9% in Fashion purchases, from 2% to 9.9% in Food purchases and from 2% to 12.8% in Personal Care purchases.

It also emerged that digital wallets and online reviews are the most important touchpoints driving internet purchases.