The partners of Ecommerce companies 2024

When investigating which three services merchants are most satisfied with, the answers were very diverse, with the exception of a few services mentioned repeatedly by Ecommerce managers such as Shopify, Google, Scalapay, Qapla’, GLS and Adyen. The fact that this view (which has no statistical value but rather expresses a general sentiment of the moment) may also change significantly from last year, is peculiar. For example, Stripe was cited by many for its innovative services such as storing credit card data for purchases on different websites. All the operators mentioned have indeed vastly innovated their service for online sales in recent times. The real game changers, however, are not satisfied with services that can be quickly tested on one’s own store were mentioned among the services.

Almost all operators expect to invest in new services in the next 12 months. Innovative Technologies (69% indicate ‘high investment’ or ‘new investment’), Ecommerce Platforms (65%) and Marketing Services (60%) are among the services that will receive investment outside of ordinary operations.
Operators are more conservative on Payment Systems (25% expect no investment), Catalogue Management and Marketplaces (23%) and Logistics and Shipping Services (15%).

Evaluating the merchants’ reasons for seeking new suppliers, the need for continuous innovation emerges (Need for innovation cited by 56% of merchants and Need for new services/features by 54%). However, there are also problems with the services currently used such as the Need to reduce costs (38%), Market/customer expansion (34%), Technical problems or limitations (33%), Service Deterioration (25%), Poor support (18%) and Relationship Deterioration (14%).

The obstacles and greatest hardships in choosing an Ecommerce service or solution suppliers are many and often concern the difficulty in assessing the cost/result ratio, as well as competences and reliability of the supplier, the complexity of evaluating and comparing different suppliers proposing different technological solutions, and the alignment with business needs and the possibility of customisation. Other difficulties include the lack of internal expertise on the subject and difficulties in quantifying internal costs.
In general, the services and solutions that Ecommerce merchants have integrated over the past two years and that have had an impact on the Conversion Rate are very diverse.
These certainly include advertising strategies, email marketing and automation, UX analysis, CRM, staff training, product/service customisation, sales revision and distribution logics, gift wrapping service and new payment methods such as BNPL’s 3-installments services.

Among the services and solutions adopted by operators, those that had an impact on the Cost of Acquisition include: optimisation of advertising campaigns and dedicated spending, internalisation of all advertising campaigns, marketing automation, platform upgrades, marketing attribution, investments diversification on different channels (mainly WhatsApp and telephone), customer loyalty programmes (insertion of coupons inside the package and display of the price to loyalty users visible to all onsite) and expansion of the direct and indirect affiliation network.

Emerging among the main reasons for choosing one solution over the others is the company’s experience (24%), which can be perceived by the customer through case studies on the website, references from third parties, awards received and certifications obtained. Price is therefore not the main driver even though it comes second (21%).
Other reasons that can make a difference when comparing solutions include support levels (11%) and in particular if it is also available in Italian, customisation (10%) and quality (8%) with various SLAs guaranteed and compliance with laws and regulations. Speed of activation, usability, scalability, proactivity and compatibility with systems in use (all four at 4%) are marginal but nevertheless important. Finally, some operators consider the team interfacing with the end customer to be important (3% as a reason for choosing a supplier).