Digital Consumers During Covid-19

By: Evan Frizzell

Covid-19 And The Digital Consumer

In 2020 a pandemic began known as Covid-19. This pandemic was global and affected everyone in a variety of ways. Some countries set strict shutdown policies to keep everyone away from each other to stop the spread of Covid and some places did not do much to slow the spread of Covid. Regardless of how you were affected by the pandemic there is one thing mostly everyone has in common throughout it, we became more reliant on digital consumerism. According to ReachFirst, a digital consumer is, “people who use technology to buy and sell products and services.” During the pandemic most people refrained from going to public places such as the grocery stores and restaurants so they had to get food and groceries from somewhere else. They turned to the internet to purchase everyday goods and food for themselves and their family.

Economic Impact

With the major shift to online shopping during the pandemic came a large influx of revenue to ecommerce. Digitalcommerce360 states that, “the pandemic contributed an extra $218.53 billion to ecommerce’s bottom line over the past two years.” This shows how much of an impact the pandemic had that it brought in $218 billion EXTRA, not total just extra. The total amount for 2021 was $870.78 billion within the US which was up 14% from $762 billion. Without the pandemic it was projected that ecommerce sales would not have reached $870 billion till 2023 and it would have only reached $754.33 billion. The graph below shows a visual of what total sales are happening. Between march 2020 and february 2022 the US online consumers spent a total of $1.7 trillion.

Increase in online sales during Covid-19. Source: https://www.digitalcommerce360.com/article/coronavirus-impact-online-retail/

Digital Consumer Behavior

During the pandemic people reached for new, online, ways to purchase products they would usually get in stores. This caused them to go fully digital in their shopping. According to Mckinsey.com, “industries across regions experienced an average of 20 percent growth in ‘fully digital’ users in the six months ending in April 2021, building on previous gains earlier in the pandemic.” So companies still saw an uptick in their overall digital users even after the largest part of the pandemic was over. They also stated that the primary audience joining the digital consumer were younger adults. As of right now many people in the US are saying that they will return to their pre pandemic ways and use digital channels less as they did during the pandemic. Mckinsey also stated that many people had adopted digital channels because they were forced to during the pandemic and that those channels were most likely newly built. Because they were newly built they probably were not the most user friendly channels causing the consumer to have bad experiences and making them not want to continue using them when they have their original options opened back up. This is one of the leading reasons people will be going back to their pre pandemic ways and slow down using digital channels for shopping.

Although there is a decline in the users of digital shoppers there are also a god amount who have decided to stick to their digital ways. Forbes estimates that roughly 20-30 percent of digital consumers will stick around for the long run. So of the overall new users, 20-30 percent will stay, meaning that the decrease will stop and companies will still have a positive user rate compared to pre pandemic times. This is in part to that fact that there were people who swore to never use digital channels for consuming goods and services but when they were forced to by the pandemic they came to love it. This causes a large amount of people to stick with digital channels and abandon their pre pandemic ways.

Outcomes of the pandemic

So given all that has happened with the pandemic and it finally starting to die down and return us to some semblance of normality, what are the key takeaways in terms of e-commerce? Well according to UNCTAD, they believe that the government has to better their digital readiness to benefit local businesses in terms of them being able to become a producer in the digital economy. Another takeaway from UNCTAD is that, “The international community needs to find new, bold and smart ways to work with governments and the private sector to leverage these opportunities.” Meaning that as a global network we need to decrease the digital divide among nations to allow access to these digital channels of commerce to everyone. This would allow people all over the world to purchase necessary goods and services without having to possibly be exposed to Covid-19 especially for those that have existing health risks.

Video Link:

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