What Are The Boon And Bane Of Pandemics In The E-commerce Sector?

The new coronavirus pandemic tried to give e-commerce a huge boost and led to huge sales increases for retailers of all kinds. New data, on the other hand, shows that bigger retailers took advantage of the e-commerce boom more than smaller businesses. The top 500 companies made $849.5 billion in online sales in 2020, up 45.3 percent from last year and the biggest increase since Digital Commerce 360 started keeping track of the number in 2006, the study found.

The Boom In E-commerce Sector

While retailers of all sizes profited from online sales, most new customers turned to well-known, big brands, allowing bigger businesses to take away from smaller businesses. Joann, a company that makes crafts, was the fastest-growing online business in the top 500 of Digital Commerce 360.

This is true even for the top 500 companies. The 100 biggest companies grew faster than the rest of them, according to a report on the report. It turned out that the bottom 100 people grew the fastest and the top 100 people grew the slowest in 2019. There were even more people in the top 10 in 2020. In March of 2020, Amazon, the world’s biggest e-commerce company, had trouble meeting orders on time. There were long delays and order cancellations, and for a while during the pandemic’s first wave in the US, the e-tailer stopped fulfilling orders for items that were not “essential.”

A sudden change that has long-term effects

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused a lot of uncertainty, but one thing has become clear: it has sped up the use of digital technology. Most countries saw a rise in unique digital shoppers, with a few exceptions where lockdown policies kept all economic activities, including e-commerce, from taking place. Data show that most parts of the world are growing at a very high rate. This is changing how people buy things and how businesses run. Online sales are no longer an option for brick-and-mortar businesses. They are now a must. COVID-19 has caused a long-term shift in demand for digital commerce that is likely to continue in the years to come for people who buy things, like clothes and shoes. When Jumia sold groceries in Africa, it saw a four-fold rise in sales. Amazon’s third-quarter sales in 2020 rose by 37% from the same time last year. There were a lot of new platforms that became popular in the emerging markets in Africa, Asia, and Latin America because they used new business models and made the landscape more competitive.

An upward trend with a few more questions to answer.

But the road ahead isn’t easy. Infrastructure for digital payments, such as mobile and bank agent networks, is important for the growth of e-commerce in underserved areas. Most platforms saw a big rise in the use of digital payments, especially digital wallets, which are payment systems that let people make safe, instant transactions without having to use cash. In Africa, Jumia made countries like Kenya use digital payments instead of cash on delivery for a short time, so people could buy things online. In Argentina, Mercado Pago saw a big rise in both the number of people who used digital payments and the number of transactions.

When digital payments were compared to countries that didn’t have a lot of mobile-money users and didn’t have a lot of well-established agent networks, their advantages of them became clear.