Winter is coming/Winter is coming. Like the nougat that is already in supermarkets and that, either things change a lot, or this year we will have to share it on Skype, like the announcements of El Almendro, which this year will be, barring a miracle, “Go back to Zoom at Christmas” and like the lottery (Note to the staff, if you are going to buy a Christmas lottery, save a tenth for me, because if it happens and I don’t have one, I will turn your life into hell), the end-of-year classics arrive this year a little disrupted, like our semi-confined neurons. And among them, you cannot miss the forecasts and trends in eCommerce for 2021.
Although, given the general uncertainty, it will rather be the oracle of 2021.
All of us who work online in general, and eCommerce marketing in particular, are experiencing an overload of work that I would rate as slightly above “brutal” and slightly below “suicidal”.
Although we have been evangelizing for years (sometimes we were the voices that cried out in the desert), there is nothing like a stone in the skull to make people wake up and get their batteries. And the covid-19, with its demand crisis in physical commerce as few people alive remember, has not been a stone, but a nuclear missile aimed between the eyes of the small () retail business.
The slogan has been “I need to sell online and I need to do it now”. I understand how desperate it is for a merchant, hotelier or small service provider to see their business slip through their fingers, but although I can’t help but mutter “if you had listened to us four years ago…” I want to make it clear that I know that all of us who work in this sector are fully committed to helping the commerce sector to have options to implement eCommerce systems, even temporary emergency solutions, to help them get out of the pothole as soon as possible.
For us, and I know that I am speaking on behalf of my colleagues, this is the moment in which we have to multiply ourselves in any way possible and take hours from wherever it is necessary to try to ensure that no one who needs our services is left behind. We have expanded our resources, made our rates more flexible and we are working remotely as if there were no tomorrow. We all have to pitch in to get ahead and I think I can proudly state that our sector is responding and helping like never before.
Trends in eCommerce for 2021
The announcement of the first positive results in the vaccine clinical trials has aroused the euphoria of the financial markets. It is, finally, glimpsing an exit to the tunnel that could, and I emphasize the “could”, arrive in 2021. But if SARS-Cov-2 has taught us anything, it is that it is a virus capable of giving many surprises, from its enormous transmission capacity to the variety of routes by which it can be transmitted, passing through very serious clinical pictures in people who, apparently, should have nothing more than mild symptoms given their age and the absence of previous pathologies.
Therefore, the first is not a trend, but A recommendation: let us be prudent, cautious and give science time to complete all its safety procedures and verification of the effectiveness of vaccines and treatments. If 2020 is being the year of the pandemic, 2021 will be the year of coexistence with covid-19 and hopefully 2022 will be the year of its eradication.
But we’re here to talk about eCommerce trends for 2021, so let’s get down to business.
1.The eCommerce boom will continue
At least, while the virus circulates among us and there are still restrictions on mobility. Published studies make it clear that lockdowns have helped many consumers who were reluctant to buy online to discover the comfort and convenience of this channel. This means that probably when the wave passes, the sea level will have risen. Before anyone goes O_o, I want to say that lockdowns and fear of closed spaces will pass, but many new online shoppers will continue to use this channel more than before.
2.Consolidation of local eCommerce
Another of the trends in eCommerce for 2021, which was already beginning to show ways before 2020 and that this year will probably have settled permanently.
Local commerce is digitizing against the clock, something that would not make sense to disappear once the investments and changes necessary to enter eCommerce have been made. It is not about selling big and everywhere, but about open the online channel so that their local customers continue to buy from them.
Some, hopefully many, will return to physical stores when all this is over, but the pandemic has made us jump 2 or 3 years into the future with a push. The local customer is already, and will continue to be, a digital customer.
3. 2021 could be the year of the showrooms
And of the Kleenexbecause all the viruses of the common cold that we are not catching due to the current security measures will be waiting for us when we take off our masks, back at the end of the year if everything goes reasonably well.
The model ‘show room’ (you decide offline what you want to buy after seeing it and/or trying it, but you buy it online) has gradually become part of the preferences of big of the retail, so in 2021 we may see them start to pop up in shopping malls like mushrooms after the fall rain.
Showrooms are an online-offline integration model that It has many advantages:
- less space requirement
- eliminate store storage (very expensive) to refer it to own or third-party logistics platforms (much cheaper)
- much less crowds
- since there are no queues to pay
- convenience for the customer who receives the product at home
- significant reduction in the rate of returns, which cost a lot of money and do not generate anything positive for either the customer or the seller.
- They don’t even have to be permanent establishments, you can have your showroom open for a limited time and rotate it by yourself.
4. Online food shopping will continue to gain ground
Confinement through, one of the great walls of eCommerce in Spain has fallen.
2020 has seen as l in categories of best selling products online. Although that jump caught all the greats of the distribution with the shame in the air (some directly suspended online sales, others had servers so poorly sized that they had to impose virtual waiting rooms so they wouldn’t explode and almost all failed to meet delivery deadlines; come on, what the systems they had mounted were from chichinabo) as is the case with local eCommerce, the investments that have had to be made to support the peaks in demand will have to be profitable.
On the client side, We have lost the fear of shopping online. No, they don’t send us the squashed bananas or the putrid apples, the purchase arrives in 12 hours at most and in good condition. And, which for a server is not a minor issue, the tomatoes have not been touched 200 times by who knows who (if I were to speak…) and how dirty that person’s hands are, no matter how much they wear gloves.
Be that as it may, online food shopping is one of the trends in eCommerce for 2021 that will continue to rise.
5. Omnichannel hospitality
The hospitality industry is already reacting differently to the closure of the second wave than to what happened in April and May. Many more bars and restaurants have opted for the take away and home delivery. Many others, unfortunately, are closing down permanently or will do so soon.
The hotel industry is going to undergo a reconversion process, as has happened before to other sectors in the face of serious crises. That basically means that they will incorporate digital tools to manage orders, collections and shipments. We will probably see a boom of new mobile apps dedicated exclusively to takeaway food and other innovative ways, such as the case of
and eye to , that has the paid field to enter strong in the hospitality sector. We will probably see the development of new hotel business models, where you work directly in the kitchen and send the food to your home or to collection points, transcending the classic restaurant concept to a purely digital one.
6. Amazon up in the soup (literally)
Amazon, as long as the US competition authorities do not get their hands on it, will continue to extend its radius of action. It is already sticking its paw out in the insurance sector with Amazon Protect and I doubt that he will pass up the opportunity to promote his online supermarket.
But there is life in the marketplace segment besides Amazon. Beyond the fashion sector, where Zalando and ASOS they are stomping, there are many market niches in which specialized marketplaces have room to compete with the giant. The growth of online sales will inevitably drive the appearance and/or development of niche marketplaces. Among the trends in eCommerce for 2021, we will have to be attentive to the rise of new marketplaces.
7. Goodbye face-to-face, hello online services
Professionals and service providers such as lawyers, tax or financial advisers, long-suffering online marketing consultants and other service disciplines that do not strictly require face-to-face attendance, have also had a romp with the arrival of covid-19.
Teleworking has had to be implemented by force, but many have discovered that an office (and the expenses that this entails) can be dispensed with if you have adequate space at home, and that this does not diminish at all (rather the other way around) the quality of the service provided.
At the moment everyone is pulling with , but one leg is missing: the commercialization and/or monetization of a service that, in many cases, is provided and charged by time. There is a demand by professionals for some type of service marketplace. I attest to this because in the last online trainings I have given I have been asked 100 times. An Amazon, but professional services. At the moment there are sectoral and scattered things, but someone will probably pick up the gauntlet of that demand.
Then do not say that I do not give you ideas.
8. New digital forms of leisure and culture
One of the trends in eCommerce for 2021 that we are already beginning to see. Culture also needs to convert beyond audiovisual content for streaming platforms. Here, More than digital culture, eCommerce trends for 2021 go through digitalized culture. In other words, giving paid digital access to concerts, theater, museums… Digitizing content and experiences that were purely offline so that people can enjoy them safely and the culture sector is not completely ruined. It is essential that you look for new ways to create useful content for your audience.
There are even successful experiences of individual consumption culture in real time: you pay for a performance or a poetry recital just for you, or that they give you a guided tour of a museum in which you…
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