BonelliErede’s Luxury Focus Team, in collaboration with INDICAM and Assorologi, hosted the event “E-commerce of branded products: risks and opportunities for businesses” in Milan.

The meeting brought together representatives from numerous fashion companies and offered an opportunity to exchange ideas following the European Commission’s survey published on 10 May. The EC began conducting the survey back in May 2015 to understand the dynamics of competitiveness in e-commerce and address its own approach – and that of national antitrust authorities – to more critical and common anti-competitive practices. The survey found that e-commerce is a growing sector and that, to better control product distribution and brand positioning, producers place several restrictions on suppliers that could be considered anti-competitive practices.

Team leader Francesco Anglani and partner Giovanni Guglielmetti spoke at the event, which put the spotlight on multiple issues: the results of the survey, the conditions under which territorial limitation on online sales is legal, the possibility to limit sales on marketplaces, the use by producers of software and algorithms to monitor the prices distributors apply online, and the legality of restrictions on online distributors using producers’ brands as keywords for their own positioning on the web.