The COVID-19 pandemic has brought about a huge change in the way people shop around the world. With the spread of the virus, drastic steps were taken where many countries were under lockdown for months. This caused consumers to move more towards online shopping. Though there has been a rising trend towards online shopping from the past few years, this kind of rise in the eCommerce sectors graph was never witnessed before.
This sharp rise in favour of online sales has raised questions on the prospects of brick and mortar stores. Has the pandemic changed consumers shopping behaviour for good or is this just an act based on what’s the best today? Is there any hope for getting back to “normal”, if not then what steps should sellers take to sustain in the future?
The coronavirus pandemic has hit every business very hard. Setting up an online business with the best payment gateway is one of the ways to move ahead.
What role did COVID-19 play to make people move to the online shopping mode?As per the World Trade Organization, the implementation of lockdowns and following the social distancing rules has been the biggest factor to change peoples shopping behaviours and chooses the e-mode. This has resulted in a very sharp rise in sales for Business to Consumer (B2C) and more traffic in other eCommerce activities.
Special websites have lots of information on the effect of COVID-19 on eCommerce business. The data when compared using a yearly filter has shown that the eCommerce business has grown over 100% in many cases. Data has been driven taking into account both regular retailers and online stores.
This sort of rising in online sales was very much bound to happen when shoppers had no chance to shop in person. Even though online sales have risen, this does not happen for all eCommerce sectors.
What are the effects of this pandemic on different industries?
The biggest spike in online sales has been for essential products mainly being food and beverages. Apart from this other product that falls under the essential category and has seen a big rise in sale and demand are medical supplies like masks, gloves, pain and cough medicines.
As the initial scare passed, people moved on to buying other goods online too as they realised how safe it was this way.
Many online stores came up with new categories like “all essentials” and that included selected products from the main category Health and fitness, Electronics, Toys and hobbies, Home improvement, Office supplies, Beauty and cosmetics, Telecommunications, Internet, Mobile data services and Housewares to name a few.
The products listed in the above categories have seen a rise in online sales during the past few months and it continues. Subscription-based services like Netflix has also seen an increase in the number of subscribers.
The sectors that faced major drops are Tourism, Luxury and Fashion.
Even though the list of big looser seems to be less but they have lost a lot in revenue. It is estimated that an approximate €45 billion declines in the sale last year for these sectors.
How are small and mid-sized businesses coping with the pandemic situation?
The pandemic has slowed down the past few months and there is a sudden surge again. Businesses now have the chance to tweak their online presence. Having a user-friendly optimized website is very important for a good online presence. To support this, being visible in social media and other online advertising media is very necessary.
The best place to start is browsing through the resources and tools by Google that has been released to help small businesses during this Covid pandemic. There are free digital training resources that can help one manage elements of an online store.
Irrespective of the situation, a good payment gateway is always a must to get more customers
The main key for a successful online store is the perfect payment gateway. Shoppers leaving a cart and not going ahead to make payment is a big cause of concern for numerous eCommerce merchants. Generally, the reason for this is limited payment options or a very complex payment procedure.
A good payment gateway isn’t only important for the customer experience; it helps make your operations efficient too. Your gateway should be easy to implement and reduce the time and effort it takes to manage customer payments.
Having a good payment gateway is not only important in terms of gaining customers, but it also helps in efficient operations from the merchant point of management. The implementation time should be minimal and at the same time management of customer, payments should be very smooth.
The pandemic is still not over and we all need to be safe. One of the ways to stay safe is staying home. Shopping online can help in this in a big way.