With vaccine rollouts accelerating across the United States and beyond, post-COVID surveys have emerged. Looking forward has turned to looking back as marketers examine how the pandemic accelerated e-commerce adoption and growth. Without a doubt, successive lockdowns had a tremendous short-term impact on e-commerce sales. According to SearchNode, 50 percent of companies saw online sales grow by over 100 percent. E-commerce instantly jumped five years ahead, reaching the levels projected for 2025 in 2020. However, will this evolution become long term? Will e-commerce become the prevailing channel for brands beyond 2021?
A study from Everest Group showed that one of the biggest challenges comes in the form of the human component, as it’s often easier to evolve technology than change a person’s mindset. Brands must invoke a complete cultural revolution internally by prioritizing the recruitment of digital-savvy and omnichannel experience experts. Offline and online retail teams must merge as well by training to operate together and consider the outcomes of all sales channels.
