This report provides an overview of how leading e-commerce companies responded to the COVID-19 crisis between January and March 2020. The companies included in this report are Alibaba, Amazon, eBay, Farfetch, Flipkart, JD.com, Jumia, MercadoLibre, Pinduoduo, Shopify and Zalando. Key strategies employed in this quarter included accelerating planned investments, finding creative ways to boost category coverage, and developing plans to support smaller partners.
This report comes in PPT.
Worldwide, consumers turned to digital channels in the first quarter of 2020, as governments mandated that non-essential businesses in many markets close, bricks-and-mortar stores faced shortages of certain product categories, and many consumers became concerned about the safety of visiting physical store locations due to the risk of being exposed to the virus. Pure e-commerce, omnichannel efforts such as click-and-collect, and last mile delivery services all saw sales grow rapidly.
Marketplaces around the world faced calls to prevent their sellers from engaging in exploitative pricing on key products amidst record demand for these products, such as masks and hand sanitiser. Most major marketplaces enacted measures to identify and remove sellers engaging in price gouging, but many struggled to do so quickly and accurately. Marketplaces also faced pressure to restrict the language sellers could use in listings to prevent items from being marketed as COVID cures.
While e-commerce sites did not face the widespread closures affecting many bricks-and-mortar locations in the first quarter of the year, some online players were forced to close certain warehouses due to being declared non-essential. Amazon, for example, was forced to close its warehouses in France, and luxury resale platform The RealReal was also forced to close its California-based warehouses.
Many consumers bought groceries and other household essentials online for the first time during early 2020, to avoid going to stores. Demand for grocery delivery in particular exceeded companies’ ability to fulfil orders; for example, Amazon temporarily closed its online grocery service in the US to new customers as a result. While demand is likely to stabilise, the long-term trend towards online grocery sales has likely been sharply accelerated.
Retail is the sale of new and used goods to consumers from a business for personal or household consumption from retail outlets, kiosks, market stalls, vending, direct selling and e-commerce. Retail is the aggregation of Retail Offline and Retail E-Commerce. Excludes specialist retailers of motor vehicles, motorcycles, vehicle parts. Also excludes fuel sales, foodservice sales, rental transactions, and wholesale sales (e.g. Cash and Carry). Sales value excluding or including VAT/Sales Tax. Retail also excludes the informal retail sector. Informal retailing is retail trade which is not declared to the tax authorities. Informal retailing encompasses (a) sales generated by unregistered and unlicensed retailers, i.e. retailers operating illegally, and (b) any proportion of sales generated by a registered and licensed retailer that is not declared to the tax authorities. Unregistered and unlicensed retailers operate predominantly (although not exclusively) as street hawkers or operate open market stalls, as these channels are harder for the authorities to monitor than permanent outlets. Activities in the illegal market, which is usually understood to refer to trade in illegal, counterfeit or stolen merchandise, are included within our definition of informal retailing. Activities in the “grey market”, which is usually understood to refer to trade in legal merchandise that is sold through unauthorized channels – for example cigarettes bought legally in another country, legally imported, but sold at lower prices than in authorized channels – will be included as informal retailing if no tax is paid on sale by the retailer. However if the retailer pays tax – for example on cigarettes bought legally in another country but sold at a lower price than standard – the sale is included within formal retail.
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