It’s official, France and many European countries are, once again, quarantined. While the holiday season is approaching, stores are forced to close, which means that in 2020, Christmas shopping will mostly be online.
Good news for e-commerce!
Online Sales Will Be The Star Of Christmas 2020
Forget the sleigh and the reindeers, this year Santa Claus will be using the Internet to deliver our presents. According to a study led by Ipsos on the COVID-19 ordered by Google, 46% of French buyers will do their shopping mostly online unlike previous years, and 58% of them will be looking for present ideas online, even after the possible re-opening of the shops.
Forrester Research, an American market research company, estimates for now that in North America, e-commerce sales will grow faster than in 2019: online retail will be growing 18.5% in 2020, so that it will reach 20.2% overall penetration in North America.
This increase will especially affect the sectors of computers, electronics, health, beauty, media, entertainment, apparel & accessories, appliances, grocery and homeware & furniture.
Social Selling, The Love Story Between Social Media and E-Commerce
With the huge increase of online sales, e-commerce platforms have came up with new ways to reach their targets to adapt their methods to the buyers’ new habits. E-commerce platforms have started for a few years to develop innovations that help them merge with social media platforms. Those functionalities create a new customer journey that turns social networks into sale channels.
This method, called Social Selling, is being adopted by more and more e-commerce platforms, especially now that half of the world uses social networks and that the Covid-19 crisis have considerably increased online sales.
Social Selling makes the clients directly meet with the products, unlike regular e-commerce that invite them to go on specific platforms to purchase a specific product. It is an approach based on research, proposition and interaction with potential prospects that allows to develop and increase business logics by putting media at the centre of the sale.
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