E-commerce: + 31% in 2008 for Shopping24, 24 ORE Group’s e-commerce channel

Milan, 29th January 2009, SHOPPING24, 24 ORE Group’s e-commerce channel, closed 2008with impressive figures and sales revenues at 10,880,000 Euro, up 31% vs. 2007, building on the results of the previous years. The strong performance is spread evenly across the whole channel offering: from Books to Subscriptions, from Software to Professional Databanks, and from Training Courses to Online Services.

Results achieved thanks to the increasingly broad product catalogue ofwww.shopping24.it, which will be further expanded in 2009. As for users, they will benefit from increased service levels and additional functions.

At end 2008, Shopping24 opened its doors to two new products: thanks to the agreement with Grande Libreria Internazionale Hoepli, 24 ORE Group’s e-commerce channel broadened the Books sector, adding thousands of new titles and new theme categories such as fiction, art and graphics, history and essay writing, manuals and IT,travelling and cookery, and launched a new section: Films and DVDs. 
Thanks to this agreement, not only does IlSole24Ore.com further expand and enrich its online offering to the benefit of its users, but, as partner in product selling and forwarding, it can also draw on the experience and skills of the booksellers of Grande Libreria Hoepli from Milan.

The second new offer is AutoCAD LT® 2009, now available for sale on Shopping24. Thanks to the partnership between Shopping24, Autodesk Inc., world leader in design software, and Autodesk’s strategic partner Infoklix S.p.A., AutoCAD LT 2009, the world's best-selling 2D design software, can now be purchased online on Shopping24.it.

As far as service implementation is concerned, due to the broader product catalogue, new and more effective search functions have recently been added to the website to help users surf through the whole catalogue in a user-friendlier way.

 

The next few days will see the integration of the Onebip payment system used to purchase a number of services in the catalogue. Onebip is a mobile phone-based payment system currently in use in 37 countries and integrated with over 190 mobile phone operators. Italian technology chosen by Shopping24 for the sale of digital contents.

 

To conclude, last November Shopping24 joined Consorzio NetComm, the consortium that promotes e-commerce in Italy, representing sector companies and entrepreneurs in their relations with national and international institutions, and providing support in legal and tax matters, copyrights, safety and in any other issue that contributes to the development of a digital market.