Take a grand piano, lift the lid and hold down the right-hand pedal – the one that lifts the dampers and frees the strings. Then strike a single C, forcefully, and release the key immediately. The note you’ve struck fades almost at once. The instrument, however, continues to vibrate: the neighbouring strings, which no finger has touched, have picked up that frequency and are sending it out into the air. A single gesture, a sound that spreads throughout the entire soundboard.
In the Italian digital economy, that resonance has a precise figure: 5.6. This is the multiplier calculated by Netcomm in collaboration with Nomisma in the study ‘The contribution of the digital value network to the competitiveness of the Italian economy’, presented in Rome. The significance lies entirely there: every euro spent online generates 5.6 euros of economic value along the production chain. One finger on the fret, six strings vibrating.
NOT A CHANNEL, BUT AN INFRASTRUCTURE
For those who love them, these are the sort of figures that stick in the mind. In 2025, digital commerce generated a total economic value of 993 billion euros: 293 billion in added value — the wealth that remains within the system in the form of wages, profits and taxes, equivalent to 13 per cent of GDP — and 700 billion in factors of production and intermediate goods, that is, everything that businesses purchase to operate. Behind those figures lie 2.2 million jobs, around 9 per cent of the Italian total, and nearly 69 billion in tax revenue in 2025 alone.
“E-commerce is not a channel in its own right, but an infrastructure that connects businesses, skills, logistics, payments and employment,” explained Roberto Liscia, president of Netcomm. That is precisely the right word: infrastructure. Like a water supply system, you notice it most when it is missing.
THE FASTEST-GROWING EXPORT SECTOR
This issue is of particular relevance to those who manufacture shoes and handbags. Between 2023 and 2025, Italian digital exports grew by 9 per cent, three times faster than overall exports, which remained at 3 per cent. Put simply: ‘Made in Italy’ products travelling via digital channels are moving faster than those relying solely on traditional channels. And they are breaking down the barrier that has always held small businesses back — the cost of building a physical distribution network on the other side of the world.
The most digitally-oriented Italian companies have already realised this: for 20 per cent, e-commerce is the main sales channel on international markets; for 26 per cent, it is a strategic channel for accessing foreign markets; and almost one in two — 49 per cent — plan to invest in digital channels to support exports within three years.
However, there is one sentence in the research that is worth reading twice. Italy, Liscia warns, still lags behind in terms of the digital maturity of its businesses, the skills of its workforce and its ability to grow in foreign markets through digital channels. This is not merely a technological lag: it is structural and cultural.
And this is where our sector must take a long, hard look at itself. No supply chain is more physical than ours: the leather you touch, the wooden last, the stitching you check with your fingers. Yet the channel that today carries that physicality furthest is the most intangible of all. The workshop and the algorithm, for once at least, should be pulling in the same direction.
AI AT THE SALES COUNTER
71 per cent of those who already use AI in their private lives have used it to guide a purchase: they look up product information (51 per cent), compare alternatives (42 per cent) and check reviews (32 per cent). Among Millennials and Gen Z, these figures rise to 80 per cent and 79 per cent respectively. And over half of the sample — 53 per cent — expect to use it even more when shopping by 2030.
Those selling shoes and bags should take particular note of this. If a customer arrives at a product via a virtual assistant, then the product specifications, images, and information on materials and sustainability cease to be mere marketing details and become the criteria by which the algorithm decides whether or not to display your product. Those who pay attention to these details will be visible. Those who neglect them will simply remain invisible.
THE POLICY WE NEED
Underlying all this, Netcomm is calling for something that is easy to say but difficult to achieve: treating digital commerce as a strategic sector. There are four key demands: the digitalisation of SMEs, skills, digital exports and regulatory simplification. For exporters, the most pressing issue is customs: a harmonised digital system across Europe, free from uncoordinated national interventions that raise barriers within the Single Market. Because for a resonance to propagate, no one must place a hand on the strings.
