30-second summary:
- Despite 2020’s challenges, ecommerce sales increased over the 2020 holiday — up 49 percent over 2019, pointing to a dramatic shift in 2021.
- Brands employed new strategies, like curbside pick-up, to increase shopper’s comfort levels in the midst of a pandemic.
- To leverage large quantities of customer data from multiple sources, brands will seek solutions that enable them to extract value from the data to drive intelligent decisions on delivering the right products at the right time at scale.
- Despite the explosive growth of ecommerce brands must continue to invest in multichannel business models, optimizing the customer experience both in-store and online.
- Retailers can boost ecommerce growth even more in 2021 by using AI to deliver highly relevant customer experiences.
It’s impossible to sum up 2020 in one word, but “unpredictable” is a good place to start. Looking back to last January, very few of us could foresee a pandemic that would sweep across the globe. As a new year starts, we’re all looking ahead with hope for a return to normalcy. Travel, hospitality, and retail were a few of the hardest hit business sectors in 2020. However, even before the pandemic, retail was going through a “reset” or “transformation” which some called the retail apocalypse. The pandemic accelerated ecommerce growth and the transition as consumers turned to online shopping, with their favorite stores temporarily shuttered and then for their health and safety as they re-opened.
As the 2020 holidays approached, no one could predict how it would play out. Given the economic downturn due to business closures, unemployment, and the subsequent drop in consumer confidence, would the holidays, normally the yearly peak shopping period, be a bust? We now have some answers thanks to a new Mastercard SpendingPulse[1] report