Aruba and ePages take Italian businesses online

• Italy's leading internet provider Aruba offers e-commerce cloud platform from ePages
• New online shops for physical products, virtual goods and reservations
• Strong growth in Italian e-commerce market expected

ePages, provider of the world's leading e-commerce cloud services platform for SMBs, announces a major new partnership in the Italian market. Aruba, Italy's leading internet provider, cooperates with ePages and offers the ePages solution to all its customers. "As Italy is a market with great growth potential in e-commerce, we're happy to be present here as a partner of Aruba. Like in other European markets we're aiming to give small and medium sized companies the opportunity to develop their online sales channel by providing 'easy-to-use' business applications," said Wilfried Beeck, CEO of ePages GmbH.

The offer is very much tailored to the specific needs of Italian online merchants. Aruba sells three different types of solutions on http://e-commerce.aruba.it/. The Easy Product Shop is intended for businesses that offer physical products, from clothes to accessories or gifts. The Easy Download Shop is designed for companies that sell virtual goods such as mp3 music or e-books. The Easy Booking Shop is designed for service companies to provide their customers the ability to make online reservations, especially in tourism.

Upgrade allows offering up to 20.000 items in 13 languages

By upgrading their Easy Shop to an Advanced or Professional package, merchants can create bigger commerce sites. The Professional version allows to present up to 20,000 products or manage online booking systems with up to 150 resources. The shops are available in 13 languages and support up to 100 currencies. Through the cooperation with more than 60 technology partners, ePages offers integrations into the most important online portals like eBay, Amazon or Pikengo - one of the Top-5 retail sites among internet users in Italy - search engines, marketing platforms, shipping methods like the Italian company SDA and payments with a broad acceptance in Italy like Gestpay and IFGS.

Some special features help online merchants to improve consumer loyalty and visibility on the internet. With ePages, merchants can use advanced web marketing tools to increase the number of new customers; e.g. newsletters, coupons or social media plug-ins. An SEO-Cockpit generates a quality index for every web page. ePages has developed and optimised the shop content's display on mobile devices which focusses on the special needs of mobile users.

Aruba's new offer arrives on the Italian market at a time when e-commerce is expected to grow rapidly. Online sales to consumers will have more than doubled by 2016 to $31.25 billion from $12.88 billion in 2011. In Italy e-commerce is not yet as common as in other European countries. Only 38.5% of Italian internet users have bought something online in 2011, compared to 82.5% in the UK and 74.6% in Germany (market research data from eMarketer).

Aruba, founded in 1994, is a leading service provider in Italy for hosting and domain registration and has leading positions in Czech Republic and Slovakia as well. The group Aruba S.p.A. manages over 2 million domains, 6 million email boxes, 20.000 managed servers and more than 2 million customers. The company is also an expert in cloud services and offers infrastructure as a service (IAAS) which allows clients to create one or more virtual machines. This offer is safe, completely scalable, fast and customizable.