Lockdown? Three out of four SMEs do not sell online

Giving up online sales can be a legitimate choice, sometimes strategic, but usually based on a limited vision of what the potential market for your business can be. Now that the lockdown returns to lengthen like a shadow on the market, however, there will be a large portion of companies that risk finding themselves without alternatives, without skills and without the ability to react to the emergency. This will limit the adaptive capacities of a sector that over time has always shown great resilience, but which in this circumstance is faced with an event of abnormal impact and against which there will be no temporal margins of reaction.

SMEs: the online bet has not yet been grasped

A study by the Digital Innovation Observatory in SMEs of the Politecnico di Milano indicates 76% of SMEs that do not register online sales. “Furthermore”, adds TeamSystem, partner in the conduct of the survey, “still too few companies (15.8%) have developed their own e-commerce website or app on which to sell their products“. Thus Federico Leproux, CEO TeamSystem:

Since the peak of the health emergency, digital and cloud computing have immediately proved to be a fundamental resource for companies which, thanks also to the adaptability of entrepreneurs, have continued and continue to organize, plan, collaborate, to sell, in a word to do business. Digital has worked, it's working. However, the undeniable progress made by Italian companies so far is not enough. They need to be further strengthened, also in light of the coming months which will potentially be just as challenging as the lockdown phase. We need to ensure that all the players in our economy, including institutional stakeholders, understand that digital is no longer an option, but an indispensable path. The future of Italy will depend on this.

According to Amazon data, however, this is an extremely dynamic and evolving sector. Today there are 14,000 Italian SMEs selling through the marketplace, 600 of which would have exceeded one million dollars in sales through this channel. On average, the sale on Amazon is worth something like 75 thousand euros per year, therefore with strong differences between different companies and sectors. However, Amazon is only one of the possibilities, something that combines logistics with an important showcase. To all this are added the successes of Shopify and other tools that can facilitate the online landing of more mature and structured companies (this does not mean that they must be large: far more important is the full awareness of what the online market can lead to the business project).

The realities that had already adopted a multi-channel strategy have found in Amazon and in e-commerce the tool to expand the customer base and diversify, to be able to better face the challenges. The performances described in the report we are presenting today are concrete evidence of this

Ilaria Zanelotti, Director of Seller Services at Amazon