The move from physical retail to E-commerce has been a gradual but steady one. Over the past 10 years, the share of E-commerce as a percent of US retail sales increased by about one percentage point a year. By 2019, that equated to 16% of total retail sales.
A shift was inevitable. Shopping for necessities is not high on the list of favourite pastimes and it was only a matter of time before the convenience of E-commerce made it the dominant form of shopping. But with COVID-19, the shift accelerated dramatically.
Over the course of just eight weeks, the share of E-commerce almost doubled. What previously took ten years was achieved in only two months, as consumers were forced to adapt to a new reality.
Retail wasn’t the only beneficiary of this digital shift. CEO of Microsoft Satya Nadella commented on the most recent earnings call that, “We’ve seen two years’ worth of digital transformation in two months. From remote teamwork and learning, to sales and customer service, to critical cloud infrastructure and security - we are working alongside customers every day to help them adapt and stay open for business in a world of remote everything.”
Similarly, the closing of schools forced a generation of students to shift and adapt to online learning.
But as pundits talk of “things never going back to the way they were”, I’m somewhat more sceptical.
Social interaction is part of our DNA. The desire, and need, for people to interact is something that cannot be changed. While it may take a while to get back to normal, I believe that we will revert to our old habits. As any parent will tell you, if social distancing taught us anything, it’s that e-learning will never fully replace conventional schooling...
There are, however, exceptions. Certain activities, once adopted, become second nature due to their ease and convenience. The only thing hindering mass adoption is often habit: “I’ve always done it this way”, or fear of trying new methods: “I’m not technologically savvy”. E-commerce is perhaps the best example of this. Change was inevitable, and it may have taken a pandemic to bring about that realisation.
Who knows what the future will bring? But one thing is for certain, once you get used to clicking a button and having items quickly appear on your doorstep, it becomes a habit that is hard to break.