Report Ecommerce Italy 2024

2023 saw a new international Ecommerce approach with a strong push from Chinese operators where the first four (Shein, Temu, Alibaba, TikTok) ship collectively 108 Boeing 777 worth of volumes per day for online purchases around the world.

For most of the more established sectors, competition therefore turned into an economy-of-scale rush in order to be able to afford the necessary investments to remain competitive in terms of prices and services offered.

The particular situation of our peninsula, however, sees Italian customers so keen on buying online that Italy has become the second most interesting country in Europe for Amazon after Germany2, but most of the sectors are led by foreign players at the top of the ranking.
To confirm this picture, Italy is penultimate out of 27 European countries in terms of companies with online sales percentage.

Large online trade groups investments are mainly directed towards two areas: sector consolidation through the acquisition of competitors or companies from related sectors, and on the other hand, to develop new AI technologies that will most likely change the very model of e-commerce as we know it today. For instance, Alibaba led a billion-dollar investment round in Moonshot
AI, OpenAI Chinese competitor, as well as several other investments in AI companies.

AI impact on commerce will have two results: the first, immediate, on company’s processes efficiency by increasing productivity often by double-digit percentages; the second on the interface that customers will use in the future, which is likely to be vocal, through interaction with smart objects capable of choosing and comparing as well as buying on customers behalf.