E-commerce or COVID-19 - Which one wins the battle?

The world, which is affected by the COVID-19, had heavily impacted the routine life of every individual. Considering the crisis, the Government around the globe had restricted the travel of humans resulting in lockdowns. Unfortunately, when more cities go under lockdowns, non-essential businesses are forced to close. Indeed, even people avoid public places and preferred staying at home in order to control the spread of the danger. Businesses have limited their products/services and started to change to match the needs of the common people.

Thus, affected the life of offline sellers, businessmen, entrepreneurs, industrialists, manufacturers, dealers, merchants and even the employees across the globe. There raised a major change in the shopping habits among the people. It is relevant to have a thought about buying a new dress when they are stuck up at home. Even though some people tend to buy something online, there are no distributors, middlemen to deliver the product to the one who ordered. Unfortunately, the e-commerce usage has drastically gone down.

Generally, the e-Commerce gives a huge boost to the US economy. But the ratio between the different e-commerce services or products varies concerning the pandemic season.

The new data from the COVID-19 Commerce Insight tracker shows pure-play e-commerce sales up more than 40% over the past few days compared to last year. According to Adobe's study, e-commerce sales of products such as hand sanitizers, gloves, masks and antibacterial sprays from the virus safety group have risen by 817%. Pure e-commerce and online retail sales from brick-and-mortar stores see significant changes in the US industry.

Products which help people during this pandemic are getting a lot of sales. But unluckily, the other e-commerce products such as clothing, accessories, decorative items, electronics, cosmetics, and lots more will get a huge hit considering their sales. A Morgan Stanley study projects that American gross domestic product would decline at an annual rate of 30.1% in April-June season, along with an increase in unemployment which produces an average of 12.8 % over the period. In the next year, Goldman Sachs is expecting a 24% annualized decrease in revenue.

People ought to have enough money to spend on the ecommerce products. Regrettably, this circumstance impacted negatively in most of the e-commerce products and a handful of e-commerce goods such as products which helps prevent the spread of the virus and the online grocery stores had exceedingly enlarged its online venture. After the settlement of this endangerment, e-commerce will receive a significant upliftment in the behavioural change of the people.

According to the US Department of Commerce, consumers spent $601.75 billion online with the US retailers in 2019, rising 14.9% from the previous year's $523.64 billion. We've noticed that the number of online customers got increased almost triple times, who shop for online groceries, from March 6 to March 28. It has got a raise from 3% to 9% in these 22 days. 

The number of people engaging online with restaurants has also more than tripled i.e. from 6% to 20%.

The above data was taken in the month of March. This explains that the online shopping has increased and will increase in the upcoming days. People will, however, get used to the online shopping, in the following months. The current COVID-19 scenario makes people to use the online method of shopping a mandatory one. But when the globe gets back to its regular schedule, there is no surprise in most people getting already adapted to use the digital platform to shop for their daily needs.