The commerce of the future is digital: possible new scenarios for the 4.0 enterprise
The 4.0 enterprise is the wager to win for Italian SMEs and with it the tricky sector of e-commerce. Of the many aspects that analysts have highlighted, the one that looms largest over all the others is Italy’s slow race towards digitalization, which is a long time coming. The salient processes and phases in the sector emerge profoundly altered from what appears to be the fifth industrial revolution.
How does commerce change in the digital era? First, the need to digitalize the mechanisms of the buying experience does not necessarily mean you need to sell online. In fact, it is not just about the act of buying on the web: above all, it is knowing how to direct the relationship with the client towards the new channels. It is unthinkable, for example, not to use the new tools to transmit information relating to a product or good that can also be sold physically in the shops.
The real gap though in the new e-commerce is the competence gap and the scarce support given to digital export. Not to mention this current paradox: digital export often helps to compensate for limited development on a home market, yet Italy imports ten times what it exports via the web. This impasse must be made good, or risk the reversion of the national economic system.
According to the experts in the sector, a Marshall Plan for online export is what is needed, to be integrated with a due link with China, a country that together with the USA and the United Kingdom boasts a futuristic scenario in relation to the acquisition and the fruition of goods on the web. Then the rebus of digital competences will have to be solved, involving specific,considerable hi-tech investments. All of this should be done against a backdrop of safeguarding Made in Italy, evaluating the opportunity to rethink the business model and to create digital districts.
The digitalization of the market is a priority, the urgency of which cannot be ignored. This is the real Tricolor challenge post-Covid, which we must stand up to and say “Here”, rather than trying to avoid an epoch-making change that is set to sweep across the entire Planet
