How can entrepreneurs and small business owners ‘go online’ to expand their businesses post-Covid-19?
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The Covid-19 pandemic has sparked a global spike in the growth of e-commerce sales and online businesses as worldwide lockdowns forced consumers to turn to the internet for buying everyday goods.
In recent years, improvements such as faster, more reliable internet services have become more widely available and led consumers to turn to online retailing. However, the impact of the coronavirus disease outbreak has increased demand and also persuaded many traditional bricks-and-mortar businesses and individual service providers to pivot to online.
In the United States, e-commerce sales rose by more than 30 per cent between the first and second quarter of 2020, according to the US Department of Commerce’s quarterly figures released earlier this year.
Southeast Asia’s e-commerce sector enjoyed massive growth of almost 600 per cent – up from US$5.5 billion to US$38 billion between 2015 and 2019 – a 2019 report by Google, Singaporean sovereign wealth fund Temasek, and consulting firm Bain and Company found. Yet the outbreak of the coronavirus disease has further accelerated this trend.
Last year, an extra 40 million people began using the internet across the Southeast Asian region – a rapid increase on the total of 100 million new users between 2015 and 2019.
