Seat PG Makes E-Commerce Accessible to all Italian SMEs

Seat PG is the first directory in the world to launch an innovative offer to support Italian SMEs in creating, developing and managing their own e-commerce and info-commerce sites

Turin, 29 October 2010 – Seat PG is consolidating its strategy as a "local marketing agency", announcing the new PG Shop and PG Expò services, which enable Italian companies and commercial operations to enter the world of e-commerce and info-commerce in an effective and simple manner.
PG Shop and PG Expò have been designed to expand reference markets, customer bases and marketing of products and services of Italian SMEs, leveraging the capabilities of the Internet through a "turnkey" Seat PG offering, which can be customised according to the needs and characteristics of each customer.

"We are particularly proud of being the first directory in the world to enter the field of online transactions. We have identified 100 thousand potential customers and we are setting ourselves ambitious targets in the next two years," stated Alberto Cappellini, CEO of Seat PG. "Thanks to our new e-commerce and info-commerce services, the SMEs can affordably access a market that is expanding rapidly at world level and with encouraging growth forecasts in the Italian market" .

The PG Shop service offers the possibility of managing e-commerce in all its phases and is dedicated, in particular, to consumer companies operating in the mass markets, with the aim of increasing online product visibility and searchability and opening, through an online shop, a fully-fledged new sales channel.
The Seat PG service allows the product catalogue to be updated and amended online and orders, payments and deliveries to be managed, from a single point and in simultaneous mode, in a simple and economically advantageous manner.

The PG Expò offering, on the other hand, is targeted particularly at business-to-business companies and has the aim of producing and making searchable and accessible to users its own product catalogue, continuing to manage the sales process through the traditional offline channels.

The launch of the new PG Shop and PG Expò services is firmly establishing Seat PG's role as an all-round "local marketing agency" for Italian SMEs and falls within the broader strategy of transforming the company so that online marketing services sit alongside the classical directory model.
In fact, the entry into the world of e-commerce and info-commerce further expands the offering of products and marketing services that the company is making available to its customers through the network of more than 180 Web Points present nationwide, establishing Seat PG's role as a business advisor and preferred stakeholder of the SMEs.

The Partners in the initiative
In order to provide full assistance to its customers, Seat PG has organised a network of partners specialised in complementary fields which, through their professional contribution, allow a full package to be offered and ensure maximum service efficiency.The payment system selected is XPay, part of the Cartasì circuit, which enables payments to be made with the main credit cards and works with any existing current account, ensuring security for sensitive data, after-sales and fraud-prevention assistance and concrete economic advantages compared to offline sales. T-Buy, a company of the Triboo Group which has been managing important e-commerce projects for Italian companies and multinationals for ten years, has been chosen as outsourced company specialising in Web services.
SDA ExpressCourier (PosteItaliane Group), as part of Seat PG's collaboration with PosteItaliane, is the delivery partner for the e-commerce service, thanks to its nationwide coverage.
The agreement with Become (formerly Pangora), a leading international company in shopping comparison, offers Seat PG's customers an extensive distribution network for their products, further increasing their online visibility.
Finally, Real Life Television, allows customers to develop specialist product photographic shoots, for the creation of e-commerce sites and catalogues.

SEAT PG
Today, Seat PG is a local marketing communication agency with deep roots in Italy, which it serves through a network of 180 multimedia agencies – the Web Points.
In addition to traditional visibility services, which offer detailed information and sophisticated search tools to tens of millions of users and a wide range of multi-platform ("print-voice-online-mobile") advertising media to advertisers via an extensive multimedia platform, Seat PG also provides innovative Web marketing services including Web design, multimedia content creation, Web visibility activities and a wide array of complementary advertising communication instruments. Over the last year, it has designed approximately 100,000 websites, ranking as Italy's number-one agency.
Seat PG serves as a local communication and marketing partner for Italian small and medium enterprises (SMEs), large companies that operate within the country and central and local government. By leveraging the efficacy and dissemination of its products and services, Seat PG brings supply and demand together, registering approximately three billion views of its media each year and helping complete transactions that represent nearly 10% of Italy's' GDP.
SEAT Pagine Gialle has been engaged in information services and search and communications tools for over 80 years. It is a success story based on a brand that is familiar to everyone, a sales network employing over 2,000 persons, a technology and a product range in constant evolution and a database that includes 13 million households and 4 million businesses (2009 data), and a wide range of products guaranteeing a real integrated system of communications to about 500,000 Italian Customers: a total of 53 million volumes (PagineGialle, PagineBianche, Tuttocittà) distributed to the homes and offices (2009 data), about 29 million enquiries through the directory assistance service (89.24.24 ProntoPagineGialle and 12.40 ProntoPagineBianche, 2009 data), and about 323 million hits on online directories (www.paginegialle.it, www.paginebianche.it, www.tuttocitta.it, 2009 data) connect people and businesses, bringing together needs and solutions and promoting economic exchanges.

For further information, please visit www.seat.it

Press contacts:  

SEAT PG
Communications Department
comunicazione.stampa@seat.it
Tel. +39.011.435.2884 

Burson-Marsteller
Antonella Violante - Alessia Quaglio
antonella.violante@bm.com
alessia.quaglio@bm.com
Tel. +39.02.721431