The ecommerce growth

What will the future of ecommerce look like? What was the impact of Covid-19 on online purchasing? Is the ecommerce market going to maintain the trend it followed during the pandemic? In order to start answering questions like these, Datareportal has collected and interpreted a series of data sourced by Globalwebindex for the first quarter of 2020. Here are some of the interesting findings.

According to Datareportal ecommerce activity is very common among users aged 16 to 64 worldwide. In fact, the average percentage of them performing each of the following activities in the past month [at the time of the interview] is quite high:

81% of respondents has searched online for a product or service to buy [any device]
90% of them has visited an online retail website or store [any device]
74% of the panel has purchased a product online [84% in UK] and 52% of them has done it via mobile phone
67% of these users has used a shopping app on a mobile phone or tablet

Globally, the average annual growth of the ecommerce market value has increased by 18% and each user has an average spend in the ecommerce B2C market of 2,594 USD [in UK the figure is almost double reaching 4,516 USD per user], that is 16% [19% in UK] of the total consumer retail spend.

Certainly Covid-19 has boosted the ecommerce usage determining the speed of its growth but, even if the number of online transactions has been steadily diminishing since lockdowns have become less strict, there are two elements that seem to indicate the success of ecommerce will endure:

the online conversion rate continues to rise
about half of those interviewed aged from 16 to 54 and 37% of the ones aged 55-64 say they expect to shop online more frequently even after the pandemic ends