Why the time for e-commerce is right now

It’s never been clearer. The best time for a business to get into e-commerce is right now – it’s going to continue to take off, and you have to be in it to win it! The bottom line is this: if a decent part of your revenue isn’t coming from online sales, you’re going to struggle.

2020 has been a record-breaking year so far, for more reasons than one. A silver lining is the positive impact it has had on online sales – not just here in NZ but across the world. This isn’t rocket science; e-commerce was accelerating anyway well before this strange year started.

A quick look at some stats will show that steady increase: 2019 clocked up an impressive US$3.5 trillion dollars in global e-commerce sales which, pre-COVID, was predicted to boom to US$4.2 trillion by the end of 2020. This was up from a (still impressive) US$1.3 trillion in 2014 – an increase of a whopping 325% within just a few short years.

In case you skimmed that last part with all the big numbers, we’re talking US trillions of dollars. With a T.

Unfortunately, this trend upwards is mirrored by the decline of retail sales in brick-and-mortar stores. We’re all too used to seeing shop fronts all over the country plastered with huge ‘for lease’ signs. This doesn’t necessarily mean people have gone out of business; it is reflective of the shift in the retail dollar - both a cause and effect of so many people setting up, marketing and selling in an online world.

Interestingly, this decline in retail has been a little lucky, in a way. As the pandemic began to bite, many people (and especially us here in New Zealand) began to get used to life in lockdown, where we weren’t able to get to any retail stores – save the supermarket, petrol stations and pharmacies – so our lives took a very sharp turn towards online-only shopping.

Due to the fact more and more businesses were incorporating or entirely shifting their presence online, as consumers we’ve been comfortable ordering online for years now. These shifting attitudes have been made it fortuitous for the pandemic to happen at this point – and although the economy is copping a bit of a beating, healthy e-commerce figures still enable certain parts of it to keep ticking.

(Think about it this way: if COVID-19 was COVID-99 instead and our movements in the community were curbed this way back in the year 2000, both the economic and health impacts of the pandemic would have been much more catastrophic.)

But let’s not talk in hypotheticals. Fast forwarding to the present day, COVID-19 has had a phenomenal effect on the way we shop. According to data provided by Emarsys and GoodData, e-commerce sales in New Zealand in April doubled compared to the same period last year. Over in the US, they saw a record-breaking boost to the online sales world, with some modelling stating that it would’ve taken between 4 and 6 years to get to the spending levels that were seen in the last few months, if the growth continued at the same levels shown since 2014.

What does this all mean? Well, we’ve had to become both swift and resourceful with how we approach business models – both as entrepreneurs as well as everyday consumers.

Right now we are sitting on the cusp of the J-shaped uptick in online sales. If e-commerce isn’t already part of your business strategy, it very much needs to be.

Want to know more about e-commerce, and pivoting your business to an online sales strategy? Excellent, I’d love to chat! Reach me at [email protected].