The pandemic has been a learning curve for many marketers, including Elana Gold, who began her role as Del Monte’s newly appointed global CMO in the midst of it.

Retail sales in France have taken a body blow during the coronavirus crisis, but digital retail is seeing gains. We expect retail ecommerce sales in France to total $77.27 billion (€69.01 billion) this year, compared with $66.00 billion (€58.94 billion) in 2019.

And even in the case of grocery, the outcomes during March–June lockdown were often positive. In the final week of April, for example, Tesco became the first UK supermarket group to fulfill over 1 million online grocery orders in a week.

Grocery ecommerce is having a moment. Already at an inflection point prior to the pandemic, the migration of essential goods to online has accelerated this trend by three or four years in the span of three or four months.

Hence 2020’s unexpectedly explosive performance for retail sales of consumer electronics, home furnishings, toys and hobby items, digital groceries, etc. In other words, the revelation of 2020 is the way in which the pandemic shattered the services sector to the benefit of the retail sector. The Top Global Ecommerce Markets.

Ecommerce’s share of total retail in Canada is higher than we previously expected, as brick-and-mortar outlets are forced to shutter and online shopping becomes a necessity.

“Many behavioral changes were initially forced on consumers, as they were left with little choice but to shop online for groceries and other products,” Fisher said. Retailers that were heavily reliant on their physical locations have been dropping like flies throughout 2020—Debenhams, a UK high street department store staple, is the latest to report it’s on the brink of going out of business.

The COVID-19 quarantine further pushed consumers in China into digital activities that were previously new to them, including social commerce and online groceries. The spike in TV time spent will be short-lived. The pandemic has steered people toward TV for critical news. However, COVID-19 has likely accelerated the migration from traditional TV to streaming services.

The coronavirus pandemic has been disastrous for the vast majority of Europe’s retailers. Digital retail has benefitted, though. In Germany, we expect retail ecommerce sales to rise 16.2% this year, and total $92.33 billion.

As the pandemic caused widespread shutdowns, consumers who traditionally preferred brick-and-mortar retail shifted at least some of their spending to digital channels.

A May 2020 survey from McKinsey & Company found that more UK adults expected their digital shopping habits for grocery and nongrocery to either increase or stay the same post-pandemic, compared with the portions who anticipated declines. Physical shopping was among the behaviors most likely to stay the same.

Some of the media behaviors adopted during the pandemic, like increased digital video viewing, news consumption and digital grocery shopping, are likely to stick in the longer term as people will remain wary of large public gatherings, in-store shopping and a potential second wave of the virus.