While traditional retail brands stand in front of a mass collapse because of the pandemic, e-commerce experiences massive growth. Recent data of the consulting group Kantar shows a significant shift towards online shopping. In just three months, international online shopping has grown by 41 %, compared to the total growth of 22 % in 2020. The pandemic has completely changed shopping habits.

This trend fully manifested on August 18th, when the British chain Marks & Spencer announced their plan to lay off 7 000 employees. On the other hand, a few hours later, Amazon released information that they are going to hire 3 500 new employees only in the USA. However, the intense state reduction in M&S is only a small fragment within the total mosaic of the British situation. The department store Debenhams is going to dismiss 2 500 employees and hundreds of further positions will gradually cease to exist in other Britain chains as well. The situation is pretty much the same in the entire Europe.

Whereas the greatest British supermarket chain Tesco is going to create 16 000 new permanent job positions to personally secure a strong growth of their online activities. It’s evident that digitization is accelerating at a high speed even when it comes to the players that have been operating on the traditional retail market for a very long time. Those who did some part of their activities online before have an advantage.

Kings of e-commerce

The current leader of e-commerce is Amazon that doubled its net profits in the second half of this year. The German fashion and lifestyle online store Zalando follows on, its active customer base has grown by 20 % during the first half of 2020 to overall 34 million. Despite its original plans, even the American commercial giant Walmart has moved to online sales and exceeded their sales estimates for the second quarter by 97 %.

Presence in the online world is necessary

The trend of shifting towards e-commerce was apparent in the time before Covid as well, but extreme drop of non-food goods sales in conventional stores have even accelerated it. This unprecedented development made retailers direct at least a bit of their activities to the online environment.

However, the existence of normal stores still plays its part. They can serve as a shop window for physical goods presentation and real contact with the customer. While shopping online brings its economic value, normal stores provide brands with physical authenticity.

This Information was originally published on the site of AFP agency, https://www.afp.com/en