The effects of 2020 on all commercial activities were indelible and so the question arose spontaneously: how to combine e-commerce and street shops in 2020? We don’t like to lose heart and we started thinking about what to do.
Focus
The first step was to focus on the problem to understand what possibilities we had available. Obviously, the first intuition was very simple: customers can’t leave their homes, so you need to bring the products into people’s homes. But are people ready to buy online?
Plus, customers aren’t the only variable to consider: are businesses ready to go online? Do they have the resources to manage shipping and customer service, with returns where needed, all digitally?
Analyze
What are people’s shopping habits? This was the first question to be addressed in order to better understand the market in which we were moving.
Italy has always been a country with the handbrake on when it came to digitization. In 2019, the percentage of people who bought online at least once was 28 million, but only 17 million users use the internet to make regular purchases.
And how much is the e-commerce market worth? We too often read huge numbers that we are not able to evaluate correctly. In 2019, e-commerce saw a 17% turnover growth, an impressive result, but how much money are we talking about?
In 2019, Italians spent an average of 668 euros each, or 27.5% less than users in Great Britain. We are certainly talking about a rapidly expanding market, but still very young and certainly not at the level of neighboring countries.
Furthermore, much of that spending is concentrated on non-national e-commerce: 54% of purchases are made on non-Italian sites, with Amazon in the lead. If we compare with other states of the old continent, we find that the percentage in Great Britain drops to 38% and in Germany it goeas to 32%.
Therefore, this data must be interpreted with particular attention. Why are half of the purchases made on foreign sites? Clearly, Amazon is also present in states such as Great Britain or Germany, but the difference is the preparation of national e-commerce. It is necessary to build a culture of the management of e-commerce in the entrepreneurial class to really increase its competitiveness.
Resolve
How then to support entrepreneurs to build their e-commerce in a sustainable way and support them in the learning process of the market? Our answer was Eshop su misura, a project born with the aim of supporting entrepreneurs in a time of economic difficulty in which it was not easy to invest in digital.
But building e-commerce has important costs, especially in the start-up phase for the construction of the graphic design, the study of all the functions, and the installation of the components. And then, does all of this study have value in the small business market?
The answer is counterintuitive: it has no value. Not because it is intrinsically not sensible to do this analysis, but because we already know that the Italian market is digitally far behind, so the need is to leave, and go online!
Once familiar with e-commerce, every entrepreneur will be able to make the following considerations and implement increasingly advanced features.
Execute
We had everything we needed.
Eshop su misura was ready to be born and only needed a little push to make it see the light. We have chosen to rely on an open-source platform that allows us to move without additional costs and with all the freedom of a system that wants to grow over time.
We have built a basic package from which to start at a cost that every company, even in a difficult period like 2020, could have sustained.
We have built many update packages, to allow every entrepreneur to build his e-commerce as best he wanted, adding only the necessary features.
We have built the theme templates from which to start building your own e-commerce, in order to provide each e-commerce with a graphic look in line with its identity.
We apply AntScraper on our projects even before our customers and Eshop su misura could not be different. And the results would not be long in coming!
