Opportunities and challenges for e-commerce businesses in the age of COVID-19.

In the course of the coronavirus pandemic, e-commerce sales have increased significantly. These days a lot of stuff like physical meetings is not possible, so the amount of customers who are shopping online has been steadily increasing throughout the pandemic. Yet there are a lot of possibilities on the digital field. During the COVID-19 outbreak several businesses are providing extra services to their customers. Besides this the e-commerce is facing both internal and external challenges in controlling online congestion and abiding the restriction in its logistic.  While e-commerce can help you protect your customers and staff by reducing face-to-face interactions, this is only true to a certain extent. At the end of the day, you often still need to run a physical logistics center and to physically deliver your goods.

Opportunities:

Social distancing and travel restrictions have become the norm during pandemic, the traditional marketers were made mandatory to close down their shops. So, this situation has created an opportunity for new or small business to go online, since it’s the only means of survival. 

As compared to digital market before pandemic, it is found that various and varieties of business is now available online, this has provide customer with liberty to have access to wider range if products and services at competitive price and have instant browse on product knowledge and information.

Since the life style and dependency in online purchase has increased and number of user are increasing day by day, it provides opportunity for e-commerce businesses to reach out vast number of target customers, which could not have been possible in a normal situation.  The online grocery and food delivery businesses like Unber eats, Menulog and diliveroo had opportunity to grow and generate revenue in the pandemic.

Challenges:

Due to social distancing norm, Restaurants, bars, movie theaters, and gyms in many major cities are shutting down. Meanwhile many office workers are facing new challenges of working remotely full time. The COVID-19 outbreak is leading to increase in demand for certain products, while is also disrupting supply chains with transportation restrictions and establishment closures. 

Since number of customers heading online has increased drastically in the pandemic, the online businesses are encountering online traffic congestion. Due to which the customers are not happy with the experience they are going through at the moment. And there is a high chance of online system crashing down, if problem not attended on time.

Experts are finding that the virus can live on surfaces from three hours to up to three days, depending on the material. It’s likely that virus would survive on your purchased items from the time they were packed to the time you received your package. Since it is becoming clearer, just how infectious COVID-19 is, some shoppers have raised questions about the safety of receiving their online order. So, convincing customers about the safe practice and making the customer believe that the product is safe is challenge for ecommerce businesses.

Due to more people going online, the e-business has a challenge to provide advance and secure cyber security, since online traffic congestion is high most of the time.