Digital Index of the Italian beauty industry

Executive summary

Scope of the analysis

The starting point is a census of 73,000 beauty businesses in Italy. From this dataset, we isolated a core sample of 27,917 beauty salons in the strict sense, excluding hair salons, barbershops, hotel spas and aesthetic medicine clinics: these markets have different search and booking patterns, and combining them would have made the figures harder to interpret.

Five dimensions were recorded for each salon: whether a website was listed, whether that website was actually accessible, the presence of public social media profiles, direct contact channels (phone, WhatsApp, email) and registration on booking marketplaces.

How the Italian beauty sector is segmented

The segments are not strictly mutually exclusive: they describe different characteristics of the same population of 27,917 salons.

We explain how to move out of the lowest-performing segment in our marketing guide for beauty salons.

The geography of the divide

Ranking by share of salons without a website, calculated from actual data for each province with at least 30 salons in the sample.

Data by region

The 20 regions ranked from most to least digitally advanced. Each region has a page with a breakdown by province.

WhatsApp, email and contact channels

A total of 59% of salons can be reached on WhatsApp, compared with 21% that publish an email address. This reverses the pattern seen in almost every other Italian B2C sector, and tells us two things: clients send messages rather than fill in forms, and salons reply from the phones they use for work.

A total of 67% of salons have neither Instagram nor Facebook linked to their listing: in a sector where results are visual, this is the costliest missed opportunity. Those with social media but no website already have the hard part — the content — and only need somewhere for visitors to land.

Practical guide: how to use WhatsApp and AI in a beauty salon.

Marketplaces: who outsources their online presence

Only 333 salons, 1,2% of the sample, are listed on a booking marketplace. This is a very low share compared with restaurants or hospitality, where intermediaries are now the norm.

For an individual salon, the choice carries a hidden cost: a marketplace delivers immediate visibility, but the client belongs to the platform. With an independent presence, acquisition is slower and the relationship stays direct. The sector has not yet made its choice: this is the window in which building your own presence costs less than reclaiming it later.

Practical guide: Fresha vs Treatwell for a beauty salon.

What it means for the sector

For an individual salon, the digital gap is a competitive advantage waiting to be seized: if two out of three competitors in the same area cannot be reached online, demand for treatments flows towards those who can. You do not need to be the best on the web: you just need to be easy to find, respond quickly and make booking simple.

From an industry perspective, however, this is a systemic problem: demand exists but is captured by directories, marketplaces and chains, in other words by players that monetise traffic intended for beauty salons without being one themselves. Every percentage point of salons that become discoverable again means margin that stays with the business.

The right question is not "do I need marketing?", it is: can your customers find you when they search for you? For almost seven out of ten salons, the answer today is no.

Data by province

The index covers 104 provinces with measured data. Find yours:

Methodology

Sources. The index is based exclusively on publicly available information: public business listings, websites listed by the businesses themselves, public social media profiles and public pages on booking marketplaces. No data was obtained from confidential sources, purchased from third parties or collected directly from the individuals concerned.

Period. Data collected in September 2026. The published data is a snapshot of that period.

Classification criteria.

• «No website»: no own domain listed in the public sources consulted. A social media profile is not considered a website.
• «Website listed but unreachable» (dead website): a domain is listed but does not return a valid page at the time of checking (expired domain, server error, parked domain, blank page).
• «No social media»: no public Instagram or Facebook profile linked to the business.
• «On WhatsApp»: a public number associated with a reachable WhatsApp account.
• «On a marketplace»: a business with a public page on an industry booking platform.

Publication threshold. Only provinces with at least 30 salons in scope have a dedicated page: below this threshold, a single business would shift the percentage by several points, making the data misleading. 104 provinces out of 107 surveyed exceed the threshold; the remaining provinces are still included in the national and regional totals.

Why we only publish aggregate data. The source database contains information relating to individual businesses. Publishing the list would mean exposing businesses that have not asked us to do so and creating a directory the industry does not need. We publish totals by province and region — useful to anyone studying the market — and keep the rest off the website.

Limitations of the analysis

No survey on this scale is perfect. Here is what these numbers do not tell you:

• L'indice misura la online presence, non la sua qualità: un sito raggiungibile può comunque essere lento, non aggiornato o incapace di far prenotare.
• Un centro può essere attivo su un canale che non risulta pubblicamente collegato alla scheda (per esempio un profilo social senza link): in quei casi l'indice sottostima la presenza digitale.
• La rilevazione è una fotografia a settembre 2026: siti riattivati o dismessi dopo quella data non sono considerati.
• Il perimetro è quello dei beauty salons in senso stretto; parrucchieri, barberie, spa alberghiere e studi medico-estetici non rientrano nei 27.917 analizzati.
• Le province con meno di 30 centri nel perimetro non hanno una pagina dedicata: i loro dati confluiscono comunque nei totali nazionali e regionali.

How to cite and licence

The aggregate data from this study is freely reusable, including for commercial purposes, with attribution and a link to the source (CC BY 4.0). If you use it in an article, research or a presentation, we would love to hear about it.