When brands approach Europe as a single market, it is easy to assume that a strategy that works in one country will translate neatly to another. The Local Lens, GA’s series built on insights from our in-country teams, looks at the behaviours that make those differences matter.
In Italy, the average shopper tends to build confidence across multiple touchpoints rather than relying on a single route to purchase. A product first seen on Instagram might then be searched on Google, checked against reviews, the brand’s own site and a price comparison, before the shopper returns to search to buy. The same preference for choice carries through to checkout, where shoppers move between wallets, credit cards, prepaid cards, instalments and payment on delivery.
Seen together, these reflect a similar underlying behaviour: trust built across several sources and flexibility maintained through to the final purchase.
This is the 4th episode of The Local Lens, GA’s series on what actually shapes performance in each market, sourced from our own in-country teams. After Portugal, where one local payment method carries the checkout, three members of our Italian team – Alessia, Andrea and Ilenia – look at a market where no single route carries anything, from the first search to the final payment.
Discovery: research builds the confidence to act
What looks like channel-hopping is the decision-making process itself. Google has described this stretch of the journey as the messy middle: the loop of exploring and evaluating between the first trigger and the purchase. In Italy, that loop is long and shoppers go through it deliberately.
According to Netcomm’s NetRetail research, Italian online shoppers consult an average of four touchpoints before buying. Typically two are content the brand controls and two are not. On the brand side sit its website or app, used by 50% of shoppers and its e-commerce store, used by 44%. On the independent side sit search engines (56%), reviews (50%) and comparison sites (40%). Social media guides roughly one purchase in four. The takeaway is that search matters, but as one voice among several.
A newer voice is entering that loop: NetRetail 2026 reports that more than 13% of Italian online shoppers now use AI tools in their buying journey. Those tools prove most effective when they help compare products and prices or summarise information. The share is still small, but the tools do exactly what Italian shoppers were already doing across four touchpoints, only faster.
Our team sees this particularly clearly in hospitality, where the same research journey plays out across search, websites, visual content and social proof. People researching hotels often study the photos, read the reviews and explore the facilities and atmosphere before deciding. Search brings them to the brand, but the website, the visual content and the social proof turn interest into confidence.
Checkout: no method clears a third
The same pattern shows up again at the checkout. According to NetRetail 2026, digital wallets account for 34% of Italian online transactions and credit cards for 29%. Prepaid cards used on-site account for 20%. Buy-now-pay-later options reached 2.5%, double their 2022 level and 6% of purchases are still settled on delivery, at collection or at the point of use.
The prepaid figure is the one most international teams miss. One of the most widely held payment cards in Italy is issued by the post office – Poste Italiane reports around 30 million PostePay cards issued and 3.4 billion transactions in 2025.
The takeaway: in Italy, neither discovery nor checkout resolves to a single dominant route. A strategy built around one channel or one payment method will reach only part of the market.
Why it happens
Both halves of the journey answer the same question: how far can this merchant be trusted? Research reduces uncertainty before the shopper commits. Prepaid cards and pay-on-delivery limit exposure at the moment of commitment. A prepaid card caps what can be spent and pay-on-delivery holds back payment until the parcel is in hand, both are ways of managing trust with a merchant the shopper does not yet know.
None of this signals a lagging market. Home-grown operators have built real scale in the space the international defaults left open. Satispay, a mobile payment app that runs outside the card networks, reports around 6.5 million users and 450,000 merchants. Scalapay has become the reference point for instalments in Italian fashion and lifestyle retail. Both grew by serving habits that already existed.
The latest NetRetail edition also shows where the effort in the journey sits. Italian shoppers rate payment as the most satisfying phase of buying online and research as the least satisfying, with many finding it tiring to navigate. That gap is an opportunity: the brand that makes research easier has more room to win than the brand that only polishes the final step.
The takeaway: in Italy, trust is built across several sources and then expressed through choice. Take away either and conversion suffers.
Where international brands get Italy wrong
Treating ad exposure as a path to purchase
The most common mistake our team sees is assuming the customer journey is a straight line, and that the channel that performs at home will perform in Italy too. GWI data shows that 53% of Italian consumers research products online before buying, but only 13% tend to buy brands they have seen advertised. Advertising can start the journey; it rarely finishes it. The decision is shaped by reviews, social platforms, the brand’s own site, price, comparison tools and reputation. A plan that stops funding the journey once the ad has been served leaves the decisive stage to chance.
Porting a home-market checkout
The second mistake is assuming that a single European default checkout will carry Italy. None will and the home-market instinct fails differently depending on where the brand comes from. In one multi-market retailer’s own data, a German-style Klarna and PayPal setup would have covered around 47% of its Italian revenue. A UK-style Apple Pay and card setup would have covered around 40% and a US-style card-first setup 28%. The weak point is rarely card acceptance, checkouts fail when the copy says “credit card”, when 3D Secure adds friction or when instalment eligibility assumes a credit product that many Italian shoppers do not hold.
Reading buy-now-pay-later from the Nordics
The third mistake is importing Northern European BNPL assumptions wholesale. Instalments are growing in Italy, but they have not consolidated the way they have in the Nordics and DACH. In the same retailer’s data, Klarna took 15% of Italian revenue, against 77% in Sweden, 59% in Austria, 58% in the Netherlands and 49% in Germany. Treat BNPL in Italy as a growing channel.
What this changes for brands operating there
- Measure the whole route. When a journey runs from Instagram to Google to reviews and back to Google, last-click reporting credits search with work that social and reviews did. Budget decisions built on that view underfund the channels that start the journey.
- Make the brand site the place where the research ends. Detailed product information, strong photography and visible reviews give shoppers a reason to stop looking elsewhere. A site that answers fewer questions than a comparison site sends the shopper back to one.
- Be present where AI tools look. As more Italian shoppers use AI to compare products and prices, the brands that appear in those answers are the ones with clear, structured and consistent information across their site, their product feeds and third-party reviews.
- Plan the checkout as a mix. Each major method needs to work well, including pay-on-delivery, which central teams often remove as legacy overhead. For a meaningful minority of first-time Italian buyers, it is what gets the order over the line.
- Test the card flow with prepaid cards. Run test purchases with the cards Italians actually carry, PostePay included and fix the copy and authentication steps that assume otherwise.
The overlooked data point
To see whether the checkout pattern holds at brand level, our team analysed twelve months of GA4 data from a multi-market fashion retailer across 19 markets. The data runs from September 2025 to September 2026, uses revenue shares only and holds brand, product and period constant.
Italy showed the lowest share for any single payment method in the set. Its leading method, PayPal, took 33% of revenue and five methods were needed to reach 90%. In Germany, Sweden, Austria and the US, three were enough. In Sweden, one method alone carried 77%. Poland shows how local each market’s mix is: PayPal was 33% of revenue in Italy and 0.1% in Poland, where the local method BLIK took 37%, against 0.02% in Italy.
Pay-on-delivery tells a more nuanced story than the usual picture of Italy as a cash outlier. By share of revenue, Italy ranked sixth in the set, behind Hungary, Greece, Croatia, Czechia and Poland. But it was the only Western European market where pay-on-delivery generated meaningful revenue, at 8%, against effectively zero in Spain, the UK, the Netherlands, Belgium, Sweden and Portugal. Because Italy is such a large market for this retailer, it generated more pay-on-delivery revenue in absolute terms than any other market in the set, CEE included.
The data also understates the Italian spread. This retailer did not offer Satispay or Scalapay, so any Italian demand for those methods is invisible here. One retailer is not the whole market, but the direction matches the market research at every point.
The point that matters
In Italy, discovery starts the journey, but research builds the confidence to act. The same logic carries through to the checkout. In most markets a brand wins by choosing the right payment method. In Italy it wins by not asking shoppers to choose the brand’s. The brands that perform in Italy plan for several routes into the purchase and several ways to complete it and measure all of them.
If you’re weighing whether your Italian strategy reflects how Italians actually search, compare and pay, that’s worth a conversation with our team.
