Web Development for the Italian Market

Italy is the European market where the invoicing requirement drives the architecture rather than sitting beside it. Everything else — payments, privacy, accessibility — is comparatively conventional. The invoicing is not.

Every invoice goes through the SDI, and it has since 2019

Electronic invoicing through the Sistema di Interscambio has been mandatory for domestic B2B, B2C and public sector invoicing since 2019, and the scope was widened again in 2024 to include flat-rate taxpayers. Invoices are FatturaPA XML documents transmitted to the exchange system, addressed by Codice Destinatario or certified email, and either accepted or rejected with a reason. That last part is what generic billing modules miss: you need to handle rejection, correction and resubmission as first-class states in your data model, not as an error log entry.

The tax identifiers are part of your checkout, not an afterthought

Codice Fiscale for individuals and Partita IVA for businesses need capturing and validating where invoices are issued. Getting the wrong one, or none, means an invoice the SDI will reject.

The Garante has been specific about cookie banners

Italy's data protection authority issued detailed cookie guidelines: scrolling is not consent, refusal must be available at the same level as acceptance, and re-prompting a user who refused is restricted. It has also acted on international data transfers in analytics and on remote-loaded web fonts. Templates built for other markets routinely fail all three.

Payments are a mix, and cash on delivery has not disappeared

Cards, PayPal, Satispay and Bancomat Pay all matter, and any public-sector-facing payment goes through PagoPA. Cash on delivery still carries meaningful volume in parts of the market, which foreign merchants tend to design out and then wonder about the conversion gap.