E-commerce is consolidated in our country and the growth of online shopping also shows an increase in 2021. According to the analysis conducted by idealo and that time.news was able to see, the increase in e-commerce was 68% last year. The survey shows that, after a 2020 that marked a boom for e-commerce equal to + 99%, 2021 was indeed a year of ‘return to normal’, both from the point of view of growth rates and from the point of view of the online preferences of Italians. Translated into numbers, however, purchase intentions in 2021 showed interest in online shopping, however, increased by + 68% in the last 12 months.
“An important fact that confirms that the peak of interest in e-commerce induced by the pandemic was not momentary and contingent but has generated a real change in the purchasing habits of Italian consumers” comments with time.news Dumitru Baltatescu, Country Manager of idealo for Italy, on its first official release after the appointment last December.
“This acceleration in digital transformation has helped, on the one hand, to raise awareness of the online tools available to save money and, on the other, to make it clear that the online and offline world can coexist and support each other” observes Baltatescu. “Not only consumers have understood this but – highlights the manager – also many Italian companies that have 2021 to launch themselves on the digital market, after having grasped the need to change strategy to deal with the decline in offline sales. However, we must be aware that, like in any other sector, one cannot improvise and that, in order to compete with the big e-commerce companies, preparation is needed. According to our recent survey, during major events such as Black Friday, only 10% of online consumers buy on small-medium websites compared to over 56% who buy from large marketplaces.
In the year just ended, on the other hand, Electronics and Clothing return to be the protagonist categories in the online preferences of Italians, representing over two thirds of the total purchase intentions (47% for Electronics, 11% for Sport & Outdoor and 10% for Fashion and Accessories).
Smartphones are by far the most desired products online in 2021 even in the face of their price increase, equal to more than + 10%, due, in part, to chip shortages on a global scale.
Out of 100 online users, about 7 e-shoppers have used the price filter in their searches to buy a smartphone and almost half of them set a range between 100 and 300 euros, focusing on models no older than two years, taking advantage of the natural depreciation that even mobile phones register after their launch.
The prices of the new smartphone models, in fact, fall on average by 5% already three months after their launch but it is after six / seven months that the best deals can be made as, for that date, prices fall on average by 10%.