Coronavirus: In e-commerce, nothing will ever be the same again

The shift from brick-and-mortar to online retail

In recent weeks, there has been a huge shift from brick-and-mortar retail to online retail. Package volumes skyrocketed. Online grocery retail saw a 20 percent increase in order volume compared to Christmas 2019. E-commerce is booming and bursting at the seams. For example, you can see from the Electronics & Multimedia segment that order volumes increased dramatically during the Corona crisis. When the Corona crisis is over (and hopefully it will be at some point), customers who previously shopped brick-and-mortar will continue to do some of their errands online.


Tapping into new target groups

Who has not made an online order in recent weeks? Even people who rarely or never order online have been to online stores in recent weeks and stocked up on necessary products. Especially older people, who are or were not so familiar with the digital world, have discovered the joys of online shopping. And it is precisely for these groups of people that online shopping needs to be made as easy and convenient as possible. There are already a few different online shopping types. Here you can find an overview of the six already existing online shopping types. Here we now add some new groups of people who, up to this point, have preferred to shop in brick-and-mortar stores. This can have various reasons: No trust in existing logistics processes or too little digital know-how - to name just a few. However, it is precisely this target group that is now recognizing the advantages of online shopping. However, to ensure that they are not lost as customers as soon as the brick-and-mortar stores open again as usual, they need to be picked up by the retailer. This means that their shopping experience and convenience must be adapted to that of bricks-and-mortar retail. This only works if the operations experience in the company is improved.

Keeping the Operations Experience in Mind

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This is exactly the time to act quickly and provide customers with a seamless shopping experience. First and foremost, it's important to provide everyone with the best possible customer experience. But that's not all! If you also want to stand out from your competition in the long term, you should go one step further and tackle the optimization of your Operations Experience (OX). What that means. Retailers can improve the customer experience through Operations Experience throughout the order fulfillment process. All relevant process steps in fullfilment can be controlled by the retailer itself. This means that problems can be identified at an early stage and proactive responses can be made. Via fully configurable and automated workflows, companies can communicate directly and in a highly personalized manner with the customer at all relevant points in the process and no longer have to hand over this valuable point of contact to third parties such as DHL & Co. In this way, companies ensure a consistent brand experience, proactive customer service and maximized cross-selling potential.

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Conclusion: the new era of online commerce

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A new era has begun in e-commerce, as many people have already become accustomed to ordering their goods from online stores and the benefits of doing so are enormous. New target groups are being opened up and these will not leave even after the Corona crisis. If logistics processes and the operations experience are optimized by the retailer, e-commerce will have a successful future.