There is no doubt that the crisis caused by the global coronavirus pandemic has created an incredibly difficult business climate. All kind of businesses small to big industries faces countless new difficulties, with the closing of global boundaries, the closure of physical establishments, and the isolation of people at home. Many companies face temporary or even permanent closings.
COVID-19 already has an impact on buyer behaviour Online, the world is changing as fast as offline. March 2020, International advertising media, The Drum, reported a study that shows that while annual advertising growth rates in China are expected to drop from 7% to 3.9% in 2020, advertisement toward e-commerce is supposed to be raised by 17.7% and spending on social media by 22.2%.
This seems to reflect changes in consumer behaviour that are shifting from offline shopping to online shopping. They further confirm that people are spending more time home, Companies & brands have responded by switching from offline media to online shopping, with 14% reporting this.
In the same study, they go on to say that e-commerce as a platform has already grown exponentially, especially in the consumer goods sector, which has seen spending through e-commerce channels in China. grow almost seven times faster than the entire sector in 2019; a trend that the coronavirus epidemic should accelerate.
The same picture is painted in a study published by analysts from Business Insider Intelligence and eMarketer in mid of March 2020, which intimates that online business or e-commerce is expected to increase as buyers avoid physical stores. Their data suggests that 74.6% of American internet users said that they would be likely to avoid to go from local vendors shops or big shopping centres and malls if the COVID-19 pandemic in the world gets worse, and more further than half of them would avoid shops in general.
A new study by Ipsos MORI from mid-March 2020 reveals that 50% of Chinese consumers and 31% of Italian consumers say that they now use electronic commerce “more frequently”. In contrast, only 18% of UK respondents said they used online stores more frequently, and almost half of them said their e-commerce habits were “not exchange”. However, now that the UK is in containment, these statistics are likely to change dramatically, and approach figures seen in other countries where COVID-19 issues are more advanced.
While the types of goods people need may change due to their circumstances, the need to buy those goods somewhere will remain, and we will likely see a general shift to online shopping.
Article Author
Faizan Inayat