Zeppol / Guides

SdI e-invoicing for Shopify: what Italy requires, and who it applies to

Last updated 26 August 2026 · dates, formats and scope checked against Agenzia delle Entrate, AgID and European Commission sources on 26 August 2026

Italy has been doing this longer than anyone else in the EU. Mandatory e-invoicing through the Sistema di Interscambio started on 1 January 2019, and by now it is simply how Italian business works. The mandate is old news; the confusion is not. The question worth answering is not when Italy switched, but whether the obligation reaches your store at all, and for most Shopify merchants selling into Italy from somewhere else it does not.

The short version

Where Zeppol fits, and where it does not

Worth saying before the detail, because it decides what the rest of this page is good for. Zeppol does not submit invoices to SdI. Italy is outside our product scope. Submitting to SdI means implementing the Agenzia delle Entrate's own channels and, in practice, working through an accredited intermediary, and an invoice becomes a valid Italian invoice by being accepted by that system. We are not that route, and we would rather say so on our own page than have an Italian merchant install something and find out afterwards.

What Zeppol does is the part that travels: turning a Shopify order into a proper e-invoice with the buyer's company details and VAT number captured, the VAT worked out per line, and the semantics of EN 16931 underneath. That is the right foundation for Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands. For an Italian seller it is not sufficient. If you are established in Italy, you need Italian invoicing software with an SdI integration, or a commercialista whose software has one.

What SdI is, and what an intermediary does

SdI stands for Sistema di Interscambio, the exchange system operated by the Agenzia delle Entrate. The mechanism is worth understanding, because it is the pattern several other countries later copied.

In a network model, which is what Peppol is, the seller hands the invoice to a service provider and it is routed to the buyer's provider. In Italy the invoice is submitted to the state system first. SdI validates the file against the official schema, checks the routing details, and then delivers it to the recipient, returning a receipt to the sender. The tax administration sees the invoice before the buyer does. That pattern is usually called continuous transaction controls, or clearance. Italy did it first, in 2019, and Poland's KSeF is the same idea built a decade later.

One consequence catches people out: there is no separate act of delivery to argue about. If SdI rejected the file, the invoice was never issued, whatever the seller emailed the buyer in the meantime.

You reach SdI through one of the Agenzia delle Entrate's channels: the free web portal, a certified email address, or a machine interface over web service or SFTP that has to be accredited first. Almost no ordinary business does the accreditation itself. It sends invoices through an intermediary, which is what an Italian invoicing provider or an accounting office actually is in this picture. When you read that Italy requires an intermediary, that is what it means: not a legal requirement to hire someone, but the practical shape of a system whose direct connection is a technical accreditation.

The dates

Italy's timetable is unusual in that most of it is already history. It is listed here because vendor pages still describe pieces of it as upcoming.

That last row is not a deadline for merchants, and it does not mean the system stops. Italy needed a derogation from articles 218 and 232 of the VAT Directive to make e-invoicing compulsory at all, and it has been renewed repeatedly. The ViDA package adopted in 2025 removes the need for such derogations, so what happens after 2027 is an EU procedural question rather than a change in what Italian businesses do.

Who is outside the mandate

This is the section that matters most to a Shopify store, and it is the section most vendor pages skip. The obligation covers taxable persons who are resident or established in Italy, carrying out operations towards other persons resident or established in Italy. Outside it:

• Sellers who are not established in Italy. The European Commission's own country assessment puts it plainly: transactions carried out by non-resident and non-established taxable persons are excluded, even when the place of supply is Italy. Holding an Italian VAT registration is not the same as being established.
• Businesses already relieved of invoicing altogether, such as small agricultural producers under article 34(6) of Presidential Decree 633/1972, and those who obtained the exemption under article 36-bis of the same decree for exempt operations.
• Healthcare invoices to consumers. Health services billed to individuals must not go through SdI, because of the sensitivity of the data. This is a prohibition rather than an option.

Note what is not on that list. Consumer sales are in scope in Italy, which is a real difference from Poland and from the German mandate: an Italian shop issues its consumer invoices through SdI too. And the flat-rate regime is no longer a way out, since January 2024.

So the practical reading for a merchant selling into Italy from a store established elsewhere: the mandate does not attach to you. It reaches you the way the Dutch market reached suppliers who were never legally obliged, through customers. An Italian business that has received every domestic invoice as structured data since 2019 has a low tolerance for a PDF attachment that has to be typed in by hand. See the Netherlands for how that plays out without a law.

FatturaPA, and why the format is not portable

Italy's structured invoice is FatturaPA, an XML format specified by the Agenzia delle Entrate. The name is a leftover from the public sector pilot that came first; the same format now carries private invoices as well. Since 1 April 2025 the schema version in force is 1.2.3, for both the public sector variant and the ordinary private invoice. A separate technical specification for public sector invoicing, version 1.8.4, takes effect on 15 May 2026 and does not change B2B invoicing.

FatturaPA is built to carry the EN 16931 semantic model, so the meaning of the fields lines up with the rest of Europe. The syntax does not. It is neither of the two EN 16931 syntaxes that XRechnung and Peppol BIS Billing 3.0 are built from, so you cannot take a valid XRechnung file, rename it, and submit it to SdI. Italy is a genuinely separate integration, which is why it sits outside our product scope rather than being quietly listed as a supported country.

The routing detail you will meet in practice is the codice destinatario, a seven-character code that tells SdI where to deliver the file. An Italian business gives its suppliers either that code or a certified email address, a PEC. If it has registered neither, suppliers use 0000000 and the invoice waits in the recipient's Agenzia delle Entrate portal. For a customer outside Italy the conventional value is XXXXXXX.

Peppol in Italy, which is not the same as SdI

Italy is a Peppol country, and that fact gets quoted in ways that mislead. Both things are true at once, so it is worth separating them.

AgID, the agency for digital Italy, is the national Peppol Authority. Under Directive 2014/55/EU, which Italy implemented through Legislative Decree 148/2018, public bodies must be able to receive invoices in the European standard, and an invoice can travel to SdI over the Peppol network for that purpose. A certified access point that is also an accredited SdI intermediary translates between Peppol BIS and FatturaPA. The Agenzia delle Entrate's ruling 99370 of 18 April 2019 set the Italian CIUS rules for how that works.

None of that turns ordinary B2B invoicing into a Peppol job. For a domestic Italian invoice between two companies, the destination is SdI and the format is FatturaPA. Being connected to Peppol does not make an Italian seller compliant, and any vendor implying that it does is worth a second look.

Where Italy sits in the EU picture

Italy is the original of the model that is now spreading. Some countries route invoices over a shared network; others clear them through the tax authority first.

ViDA is the reason this eventually converges: EU rules pull digital reporting towards a common European standard around 2030. Until then, "we support EU e-invoicing" is a claim that has to be read country by country.

What this means for a Shopify store

Three cases, and it is worth knowing which one you are in before you shop for software.

• You are an Italian business. SdI has been your obligation since 2019, or since January 2024 if you are on the flat-rate regime. You need Italian invoicing software or a commercialista with an SdI integration. Shopify does not do this and neither do we.
• You sell to Italian businesses from outside Italy. The mandate is not yours. What your buyers want is a structured invoice rather than a PDF, with their company name and VAT number on it, correct reverse charge treatment, and the number validated against VIES. That is a solvable problem and it is the one we work on.
• You sell to Italian consumers from outside Italy. Nothing to do. The Italian consumer invoicing rules apply to Italian sellers.

The wider point holds across the continent: getting the invoice itself right, with real company data and VAT that survives validation, is the part that carries over between countries. EU B2B invoicing on Shopify covers what that looks like in practice. The transmission leg is what differs, and in Italy it differs completely.

Italy was first, and most of the EU went a different way. The EU e-invoicing mandate table has every member state, its status and its date in one place.

Frequently asked questions

This guide is general information for Shopify merchants, not legal or tax advice. Mandates, thresholds and formats change, and establishment is a question of fact rather than a setting, so confirm your own obligations with a qualified Italian adviser and against the Agenzia delle Entrate's own fatturazione elettronica pages.