One price list for the whole world

Even if it earns less than Amazon

Of course, my e-commerce performs less well than a multi-store like Amazon in mass retail, or the Yoox of my sector. Even so, it should be put online for the brand's positioning, to create transparent prices, a single price and delivery worldwide. It positions you at a higher level in terms of trust and reliability, because, at least in my sector, with Italian companies you can never work out the price. There's the Italy price list, the Germany price list, the America price list, the Russia price list.

I have one price list for the whole world, like Apple, with a currency converter.

If one of my accessories costs €250, it costs the same for the American consumer: the system converts euros into dollars. This way you don't lose sales and you are transparent with the consumer. Then, at the end of the year, you will of course have the market where you earned the most and the one where you earned the least, because the cost of shipping weighs differently. But if an Australian or American consumer wants to buy one of my products without going through a distributor, because it's convenient from home, I have the online list price. They buy it and it arrives at their door by express courier.

Transparency is total

In our shop prices include VAT, with shipping and delivery worldwide. I show availability and free shipping, specifying that delivery is by air. An American pays Italian VAT because they are a private customer, but shipping is included. You can buy everything online at list price. There are interactive photos: you click on the product you like and buy it. There are thousands of registered users, with their own reserved area.

Furniture, which has to be designed, we don't sell like classic e-commerce: for that there is online design, which I cover in another article. But the accessories, the washbasins, the taps, everything with a set price, is there with its price. Whoever is looking for the price list finds it. Whoever is looking for a discount understands it's not the right place.

Fans buy from you

The online store also matters because your brand's fans will want to buy from you. Even if a multi-brand portal offered discounts to attract customers, I have a group of fans who are beyond the level of customers and want to buy from me regardless. They want to receive the magazine, give their details to me and not to the distributor. And even if it performs and sells less than a portal, you still have more margin, because you sell direct.

In future, if you want to open on the sector's vertical portal as well, you can: there will always be the customer who prefers to buy from the official shop, as well as the one who buys from the portal. The two don't exclude each other, and the official shop remains yours.

The reasoning works the other way round too: the multi-brand luxury portal distributes Gucci, but Gucci sets the price. If you don't have your own store with your own price list, whoever distributes you decides the price. That is why in our shop, with thousands of users registered in the reserved area, prices are public, VAT included, shipping included. A detail learned in the field: a Swiss customer didn't know what a codice fiscale was, because it doesn't exist in Switzerland; we made it optional for countries that don't have one. One wrongly mandatory field loses you a €20,000 order.

Where to buy, without handing your distributors to your competitors

Clicking on “distribution” on the website shows where you can buy the product, listing my single-brand showrooms. For the bathroom distributors, of which there are several across Europe, we ask people to fill in a form: I pass it on to the agent or distributor, letting them know I'm sending people their way. This way I don't give my competitors an advantage, because if I wrote down who my five distributors in Belgium are, with address, email and phone number, you can imagine how it would go.

And if you sell abroad, in what language?

If you want to expand into foreign markets, at first you can limit yourself to Italian and English. I'd also advise having French and German, though, because they are very wealthy markets and their customers like Italian products. Not only Italian, or you are not international. And every language has everything: the copy, the pages, the video captions, the blog articles, the emails. Our database is segmented into five languages. This is the groundwork for building a brand that sells abroad: it is months, if not years, of work. The price list, in every language, stays the same.

From my book Direct from Milano and my classroom courses. Figures and examples updated to September 2026.