In the past few months, we all have witnessed how Covid-19 has changed the entire world shaking the economic market and the daily lives of people. It’s difficult to find any unaffected aspect. The novel coronavirus has marked its effect on the world of eCommerce, as well.
With lockdowns and social distancing placed in most of the countries, change of behaviours has occurred in our lives. Even after the gradual lifting of lockdown, people are adapting to staying at home, except for essential movements. The Covid-19 pandemic is changing the behaviour of people towards online shopping rapidly, and the changes are likely to continue even after the pandemic gets minimised or over. The shift on customer behaviour towards online shopping is acting as a catalyst as to how businesses will operate in the coming days.
Enduring eCommerce Boom
Many companies are thriving to survive in this situation, while for some it has opened doors of opportunities, as well. Companies that invest timely and ambitiously towards the behavioural changes can capture market shares and are likely to be successful as market leaders post-pandemic.
According to a survey, around 60% of decision-makers state that their online revenue has risen due to COVID-19. Shoppers have changed priorities completely in what to purchase, what items they should stock and what purchases to de-prioritise.
More and more people shifting towards online shopping for eliminating the need for social distancing, saving time and convenience it offers. Even after the lifting of lockdowns in different phases, most people are still reluctant to go to malls and offline stores for shopping due to the risk of getting affected with the virus. It has put considerable strain on online retailers and eCommerce businesses as they have to the meet the significant rise of customers’ demands.
Ways to Prepare your eCommerce Business Post Pandemic
If the eCommerce surge due to COVID-19 follows the shopping trend that is going on, businesses can expect much from this behaviour change even after physical stores re-open and people accepting the new normal. And if your eCommerce business does not adapt to the changes, you may fail to take advantage of the opportunities that are coming on your way.
Here are a few important ways you can use to grow your eCommerce business:
• Plan for capacity growth
Investing in technology to handle more online traffic can be expensive and hard to implement. To accommodate the increasing demand with enough servers and bandwidth requires careful planning and enough investment. Unlike the on-premises infrastructure, cloud computing makes it easier for businesses to right-size the customer experience and respond to the eCommerce trends quickly. With it, it becomes easy to scale upward or downward to accommodate customers’ demand. But this doesn’t mean that you should depend on cloud-based solutions entirely.
• Establish a strong digital experience
In this saturated eCommerce environment where many businesses are offering similar services or selling similar products, providing an extraordinary customer experience can help you stand out. High-loading website, intuitive user interface, well-designed customer support team, streamlined payment options are some factors to create a strong customer experience.
• Invest in Uptime
Waiting for a website to open its web page is one thing, and not being able to open the website is another. Having system downtime can cost an eCommerce business greatly. It creates a frustrating user experience along with substantial security risks. When the server goes down, the website may lose its ability to enforce the controls and policies to secure sensitive information.
Even if you reassure your customers whose orders remain incomplete due to not loading of your website when you’re back, chances of such customers returning back to you is very low. Establishing a disaster recovery planning consisting of backups and redundancies, and a perfect data centre strategy can help to protect your eCommerce business.
• Diversify supply chain systems
During this pandemic, one of the important lessons learned is that the global economy has to rely on supply chains that are prone to disruption. To remain viable in an eCommerce business, delivering products to the customers reliably is quite important. If you don’t have a flexible strategy to meet the existing demands, the disruption of supply chain can cause manufacturing and shipping delays. When it comes to sourcing materials, you should have multiple options so that you can meet the complicated compliance requirements.
Conclusion
The positive impact of COVID-19 on the eCommerce industry, unfortunately, provides a heavy loss for the offline stores. Though eCommerce sales may witness a lower rate post-pandemic than it is today, the behavioural changes of customers are already in motion to change the eCommerce landscape completely in the coming years.
