Is Covid-19 Shutting Down the eCommerce Industry?

The world is shutting down due to the recent Coronavirus outbreak! Even though its first hostage was China, but now, with time, the pandemic is spreading across worldwide. 

Educational institutes, business organizations – everything is getting locked down. Worldwide most of the business operations have been stopped on an emergency basis. People are being asked to self-quarantine themselves. The global health concerns are showing the immediate impacts of this COVID-19 outbreak. And it is terrifying. But beyond just the global health concerns, there is more!

The stock market is becoming more volatile each passing day. The global economy is almost reaching a terrifying state! More or less every industry is going to face some sort of adverse impacts of this pandemic in the coming days. Why? Because most of the businesses out there never really anticipated this pandemic coming in their ways. And the worst part is that we still have no idea when we can overcome this “fear of the unknown”! 

In such a scenario, we cannot expect eCommerce businesses to flourish with success. The supply chain industry has hit a devastating state. But this does not mean this is the end of eCommerce! 

So, amidst so much negativity due to the Covid-19 pandemic, what is the eCommerce status? How the eCommerce industry get out of this major shock? If you own an online business and have an eCommerce website, there are some effective ways to tackle your online store from the adverse impacts of a pandemic like this. What are those? Find out in this article. 

Making Your eCommerce Site Accessible to All

As you can see this pandemic has brought some major changes in our lifestyle, people are not getting out of their homes. Be it the aged people, or millennials, or the younger generation, or the people with disabilities - everyone is preferring to stay home quarantined and shop online from different eCommerce websites for the necessary items and goods.

So, you can understand that developing an eCommerce website that everyone can easily access is essential. It will not only help your business to reach a broader audience and survive successfully in the market but will also be effective and helpful during such an epidemic when getting out of the home is not an option at all!

Smooth Navigation for Your eCommerce Site

A tech-savvy person and someone who is not familiar with browsing sites or shopping online - the online behavior of these two types of people will never be the same. But, to survive successfully in critical times like this Coronavirus pandemic, it is better to consider both types while crafting an online store. 

This is why you should make sure you are creating such an eCommerce website that is easy-to-navigate and has high usability. Make it simple for your visitors to find what they are looking for. It will ensure the high customer experience. Along with devising engaging designs, you should consider these factors as well. Only then you can come up with such an eCommerce solution that will benefit everyone. 

Introduce Diversification in the Supply Chain

This is extremely crucial to tackle your online business during such a pandemic situation. If your manufacturing hub and the supply chain centers are limited to one specific region, any mishap or natural disaster or pandemic like Coronavirus in that particular region would result in ruining your business. 

Why am I saying it? Well, if you observe carefully, you can notice that Chinese regions are the manufacturing hubs of most of the online businesses out there. Now, China being the first hostage of this pandemic, every business operation there is hampered or completely stopped for now. 

What if you had other supply chain hubs and manufacturing hubs in some other regions? Maybe the impacts would not have been this much severe like now! 

So, learning from this mistake, you should keep in mind that it is always better to diversify your supply chain and manufacturing hubs. 

Making Sure Your Site Can Handle Increased Traffic

It is pretty obvious that in time like this when online shopping is the only option for the majority of people worldwide, the traffic of your site will increase a lot. Now, you have to make sure that your site’s structure is robust and has a powerful hosting plan that can tackle this increased number of site traffic. 

Otherwise, if visitors cannot enjoy the seamless customer journey, your online store’s bounce rate can become high. And it will leave a bad impact on your brand reputation and will affect the generated business revenue. 

See, a pandemic crisis like this or any natural calamity is not in our hands. So, it is better if we can take the necessary steps and make online stores easily accessible to everyone when time is still there.