Perspectives of Electronic Commerce: the Italian Scenario

This paper provides a brief overview on the current state and future perspectives of electronic commerce activities in Italy. As most European countries, Italy is currently experiencing a large number of initiatives focused on electronic commerce at different levels: new business organizations are being created, traditional enterprises are being reorganized to change their focus on innovative forms of business, banks and financial institutions are exploiting the new opportunities offered by trading online services. At the same time, the first attempts to regulate Internet-based business activities have appeared and some forms of incentive are being planned by the Government. The task of monitoring these activities, understanding their dynamics and predicting their evolution is, of course, extremely complex and a complete analysis goes beyond the purpose of this paper: within this work, we intend to present the information that it is felt most relevant and present a scenario that can as accurately as possible reflect current developments in Italy. The rest of this paper is organized as follows: first, we present estimates on the potential growth of electronic commerce in Italy and we compare the expected Italian growth with that of other European countries; then, we briefly discuss the quality of web applications currently adopted by the electronic vendors in their virtual shops and what are the main driving forces and concerns behind their efforts; after this, we try to sketch the profile of the Italian customer of online products and understand his behavior and the type of products he or she is more likely to buy; finally, we discuss some issues related to the regulation in our country.