A little over a year ago, a ripple called Covid-19 caused a drastic wave for the future. Specifically speaking, the commercial industries and businesses.
As several waves of lockdowns forced people to stay home, the local stores and businesses suffered huge losses.
Meanwhile, the bigger names in the industry had a different story.
Retail giants like Walmart and Target had already heavily invested in eCommerce before COVID-19.
This pre-equipped them with enough resources and accelerated sales by a great margin.
As a result, these early hints were enough to spark an idea of increased digitization in the coming years.
Getting Ready for Even More Digitization
Advancements in business sectors are always on the rise year by year.
The Pandemic just accelerated this growth and sped up the transition from physical stores to digital.
The improved technology is easily accessible and much more cost-effective, compared to maintaining a physical store.
In addition to that, the biggest factor leading to an eCommerce boom is the consumer.
People’s outlook towards shopping is changing, as the new normal supported the idea of getting things delivered to the doorstep.
As shown in the graph below, the total global eCommerce sales revenue went from $3,354 to $4,891 billion during the period of 2019-2021.
So undoubtedly, Coronavirus is responsible for the $1,537 billion growth in eCommerce.
By 2024, we may expect such an eCommerce industry where this number would be more than $6,388 billion.
The ease of buying essentials and other goods online, coupled with great safety measures, meant that people don’t need to visit their local supermarket.
That’s why local businesses are going online without having any second thoughts.
Currently, more and more small businesses and retailers are adopting eCommerce to imitate the success of the big companies.
So, don’t be surprised to see an influx of online stores in the coming years.
Transition to Faster Innovation and the Work Habits
Speaking of technology, the necessity to improve commercialization has positively affected the growth in digitization.
eCommerce stores have evolved within the span of a few years with AI doing the heavy lifting.
Most maintenance tasks are automated and even basic customer queries can be solved by a chatbot.
In a similar light, several eCommerce platforms like WooCommerce and Shopify have made the website-making process a lot easier for businesses.
Not only that, such platforms also have plenty of apps and tools that can improve a brand’s online presence.
You can expect to see much more innovation with newer systems and tools that make the eCommerce experience user-friendly and easier.
Will the Trend Stay the Same?
For the past year and more, online shopping has had the biggest share in commercial business activities.
As a matter of fact, the number of total visits to online stores went from 13.87 to 21.96 billion in just 18 months.
Would such activity render local stores useless?
Actually no matter what happens, going 100% digital is still not a viable solution.
You can still get everything you may need but as the cities start reopening slowly, offline stores will be back as usual.
However, this also doesn’t mean the downfall of eCommerce.
This will be quite the opposite, as people will still have the need to get things delivered because of the relative ease and the time it saves.
So, the most probable solution for businesses would be an omnichannel approach combining their offline store and an online store.
Author Bio
Azfar is an eCommerce ninja who’s been writing about eCommerce for over 4 years. Feel free to check out more of his work over on Conversionskitchen.com
