customer experience
product media
4 min
E-COMMERCE IN THE CORONAVIRUS AGE
What To Do with Marketing Data?
The coronavirus pandemic continues to disrupt our world. As the first retail stores slowly reopen, the greater part of the economy remains paralyzed. The crisis has hit local service providers in retail particularly hard. But what’s the situation for e-commerce?
In the early days of the COVID-19 crisis, experts predicted that e-commerce companies would enjoy a boost in sales because the majority of consumers now had more time for shopping. However, that failed to take into consideration the fact that less money was being earned overall for consumers to spend online as a result of company closures and reduced working hours.
That state of affairs is also reflected in surveys by Statista. Of the companies surveyed, 70% stated that they had been adversely affected by the coronavirus in March, with the figure rising by a further 10% in April.
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The impact of the coronavirus crisis on e-commerce companies
This concern is naturally leading store operators and e-commerce companies to rethink how they work. While online retail sales fell for the majority of survey respondents, other companies are actually reporting a rise in turnover.
A number of companies say they have scaled down their ranges in response to the decline in sales. On the other hand, a larger percentage of respondents report having expanded their ranges.
That raises the question: Who in online retailing is profiting from the corona crisis and who, economically speaking, are the losers in the COVID-19 pandemic?
Demand is rising in these sectors as a result of the coronavirus!
According to the online price comparison site idealo, there have been some significant changes in purchase behavior since calendar week 5. Growth has been particularly strong in sales of medical thermometers, dumbbells and telephone headsets.
That is no surprise considering the gyms are all closed and anyone who can is now working from home.
In addition, people in China, Germany, the UK and the USA were asked which products they purposely bought online because of the coronavirus pandemic. While the clear winners in China were hygiene products, cleaning agents and food, in Germany the top spots are taken by clothing, books and takeaway deliveries.
So we can see how products that are currently difficult to find in stores are mutating into online sales hits. However, eternal bestsellers such as clothing and entertainment media are also right at the top of consumer wish lists.
Either way, every company must give 110% during the coronavirus crisis
No matter whether the coronavirus has had a positive or negative impact on your online sales, the result is the same: additional effort and expense. Online stores that are experiencing above-average sales volumes will also see higher internal pressures in logistics and in data keeping and management.
In contrast, companies that have seen weaker sales due to the pandemic will have to ramp up advertising efforts in order to stimulate their online sales. In such cases especially, companies can create new online campaigns, landing pages, advertising images, product illustrations and much more. But this produces a large number of new datasets that must be managed.
In order to maintain an overview and link your various data management systems, it is recommended that large e-commerce companies use a Digital Asset Management (DAM) system. These are cutting-edge, high-performance multimedia databases that allow data to be managed centrally and that make it possible to exchange data between various marketing and sales platforms.
Professional DAM systems such as 4ALLPORTAL facilitate media-neutral file management and easy access from any end device.
In short, it doesn’t matter where you are or what file format you need — with the aid of a DAM solution, you can transfer that data directly to your target system.
By means of intelligent interfaces it is also possible to automatically optimize the file format or image quality for the respective output channel.
Boosting productivity with DAM = more time for your core business
Your time is precious, and so is ours. That’s why we want to help you gain more time for your core business and allow you to focus on boosting your sales in these unprecedented times.
Do you use Shopware for your e-commerce business? Great, so do we! In a direct partnership with Shopware, we have developed a clever connector that transfers content from your media database directly to your online store. Including all product-related metadata, of course.
Would you like to find out more about the possible applications of our DAM solution? If so, contact us to arrange a no-obligation initial consultation with our product experts.
