By Daniele Servadei, CEO of Sellix
In Italy, where I’m from, e-commerce has seen a significant rise both in popularity and subsequent revenue figures since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. With an “unprecedented increase in online retail sales” in the last year, it’s fair to say that consumer behavior is changing in the land of la bella vita, and it will continue to.
I’m a 19 year old Italian entrepreneur, and I’m betting on e-commerce as a disruptive force capable of breaking down barriers and borders. Here’s why.
In 2021, global e-commerce sales “amounted to approximately 5.2 trillion USD,” a figure that is projected to grow by a staggering 56% in the next few years, and reach 8.1 trillion USD by 2026. This year, the highest growth was seen in Asia, Australia, and the Americas, with Singapore and Indonesia leading the way with a 36% and 34% growth respectively. But Italy is not too far behind: in 2021, e-commerce turnover in Italy hit 64 billion euros, which represents a 33% annual growth rate. Prolonged lockdowns and long periods of economic and social stagnation have impacted the sector in the most peculiar way, bringing a country that’s famously resistant to digitization and often lagging behind to the forefront of a trend destined to keep growing.
With this in mind, I decided to take my passion for entrepreneurship and attempt to do something that, I’m aware, is perhaps not on every 18 year old’s mind. I wanted to build a leading global e-commerce platform for the digital age, specifically to help other entrepreneurs scale their businesses. In my mission to transform online payments and the world of e-commerce, I quickly realized what an incredible power crypto and blockchain technology really holds and wanted to integrate both fiat currencies and crypto currencies to create a platform suitable for our changing digital world.
And so Sellix was born.
A little over a year later, we cater to over 300,000+ businesses worldwide, offering payment processing with a focus on digital products, subscriptions, and services and radically simplifying how digital goods can be sold online. In minutes, businesses can go from an idea to a product and accept payments without a single line of code. Anyone can sign up, spin up a storefront, and start selling in under three minutes – fast, easy and secure, just like it should be.
Our goal was never to strictly become a crypto platform, but we knew we wanted to integrate the currencies of the future into the most modern product we could offer. In paving the future of digital ecommerce and building the best digital goods SaaS ecommerce platform we could, we prioritized bridging the gap between our customers and the crypto world, allowing people who might not have otherwise been able to approach themselves to crypto to do so. We were able to build our own crypto infrastructure from the ground up, to help businesses process payments with a simple setup and a seamless integration with Stripe, PayPal, CashApp, Venmo and all the major cryptocurrencies.
As for me, I have a technical background –both back-end development and solutions architecture– so I work daily with our developers on both our cryptocurrency infrastructure and applications like mobile, website, and API. I like to think I also have a good eye for management, but the truth is, you cannot have a great startup without a great team behind it. And I’m proud beyond words of the Sellix team and what we’ve built.
I believe in Selllix’s potential, and I think that of e-commerce, more generally, is almost limitless. In the next few years, we’re aiming to become one of the leading SaaS e-commerce platforms and possibly further expand our crypto offerings to include not only payment gateways but exchange services, too.
I wanted to break down barriers, and I’m proud to know that I’m doing just that: physical ones, like the limitations of in-store retail compared to selling online; technical ones, such as the integration of fiat currencies and crypto currencies; and geographical ones, if you will, starting from my bedroom in Reggio Emilia and expanding mine and my customers’ horizons well beyond Italian, or even European borders.
Because my vision is simply to pioneer a future where any entrepreneur can sell digital goods and accept payments online, quickly and easily, without any barriers to speak of. My success is proof that as long as the businesses of the future remain far-fetched ideas, innovation will continue to elude us ––but if you can streamline the process, and make it simpler for people to turn those ideas into profitable businesses, you’re halfway there. And you’re helping create a future we will all be proud to live in. That should always be the goal, whether you’re 19 or 75, don’t you agree?