E-commerce global sales during and after the Covid-19 lockdown saw a tremendous upward journey as is evident from the graph below, from a survey. In UK alone around 315,000 start-ups opened during lockdown, according to Royal Mail.

Year 2020 will be remembered not just for the COVID-19 crisis, but also for the unprecedented growth seen in the digital and the e-commerce sector due to the very crisis. Global online retail sales accounted for almost 19% of overall retail sales up from 16% in 2020.

Evolving consumer spending behaviour as a result of the COVID-19 epidemic majorly contributed to the spike in online sales, as lockdowns, social distancing, and fear of contracting the coronavirus kept consumers out of the malls and stores. 

It is interesting to note how the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic is accelerating the expansion of e-commerce involving a shift from selling retail goods and luxury services to daily necessity items. Consumers have started shopping for even the daily need items online spurring grown and sales.

E-commerce – the easiest way to do cross-border business, attracts a lot of entrepreneurs each year to try their luck. After all who wouldn’t want to grab a pie of U.S. $ 4.3 trillion in global sales.

Even with a limited budget, one can set-up and start their online business. However going digital it does require a strategic thinking.

With increasing upward trend in online shopping by customers, everyone wants to get a share of the ecommerce business. By an estimate, almost 95% of shopping will be done online by 2040.

Brick-and-Mortar businesses are quickly realising that to survive and keep up, they need to become accessible digitally for their customers lest they switch to their competitors with digital advantage.

With Covid-19 restricted movements for the businesses and the customers, companies which became digital the fastest, enjoyed the benefits by getting a greater pie of their business from online retail sales compared to overall retail sales.

Coronavirus pandemic in 2019-2020 also impacted the retail e-commerce website traffic worldwide which is said to have surpassed even the holiday seasons traffic to these retail web-stores. Due to the global pandemic millions of customers were forced to stay at home and order even daily use items such as soaps, groceries or toilet paper. Blessings in disguise sorta, right!

Established ecommerce businesses like Amazon, eBay, Flipkart, and other top players saw a surge in their e-commerce revenue fuelled by the pandemic. To make our point stronger, here are the revenue sales figure of Amazon’s 2nd quarter and last quarter of previous year. Amazon’s 2nd quarter’s revenue ( $70.11 billion) of 2020 surpassed the previous years 4th quarter’s revenue ( $68.34 billion).

Their e-commerce sales largely resulted from customers doing “panic shopping” in the wake of COVID-19 wave, especially for essential items. As social distancing and lockdown became the new normal, essential items quickly became scarce in brick-and-mortar stores due to panic shopping and hoarding.

Thus while coronavirus pandemic and resulting lockdown spelled doom for some industry, it brought boom and opportunities for others especially in the e-commerce retail industry which grew from 14% to 17% of the global retail trade.

On one hand we have companies with e-commerce business model such as Amazon, eBay and Rakuten (Japan) that grew leaps and bound and on another hand we had over 200,000 businesses, including many restaurants and brick-and-mortar retailers that permanently shuttered due to COVID-19 crisis.

Finally it can be said that every crisis brings with it both opportunities and challenges. It is up to us to adopt to the new normal or remain rigid and shut down.

We would love to hear your comments below on how brick-and-mortar businesses you know survived the COVID-19 pandemic.