Resetting online commerce
I’ve spent a lot of time in the last few years looking at ecommerce and discovery - how do people decide what to buy online, when a shop can’t show it to them? It seems to me that pretty much every part of that question is being reset this year. There are half a dozen huge industries where all of the cards are being thrown up in the air, and no-one really knows where they’re going to land. The Covid lockdowns of 2020 and 2021 are catalysing and accelerating all sorts of changes - we’re getting five years of adoption in a few quarters, and five years of inevitability in the back of the neck.
Physical retail itself has been a ‘boiling frog’ for 20 years. Every year ecommerce gets a little bigger and the problem gets a little worse, but the growth in any given year was never big enough for people to panic, and you could always tell yourself that sure, people would buy that other industry’s product online, but not yours. I think we all now understand that anyone will buy anything online, given the right experience, and if your retail model is based on being an end-point to a logistics chain then you have an existential problem.
