The impact of coronavirus for the retail industry is not only coming from social distancing. A lot of people believe that we still can feel the change even after all of this is over. The most obvious one is the change in shopping habits.
How the people around the world forced to stay at home will change how and where they spend their money. The change will also happen in the retail industry. They will prepare themselves in case the same thing will happen again in the future. Here are some of them:
An accelerated shift from brick and mortar store to an online store
After the government tells their people to stay at home, they will turn on online to get their essentials. Data stated that e-commerce user counts rising exponentially after the pandemic spreading around the world. That’s why a lot of brick and mortar stores switch to selling online due to lack of visitors.
With this strategy, their business can still be operational even there are no visitors in your store. To make their online store runs smoother, they start using CRM software mainly to customer managing or handle promotions easily.
Stock-up and Bulk-Shopping Become a New Shopping Habit
Before the pandemic, we can buy things like toilet paper or disinfectant literally from anywhere. But now, it’s become rare commodities. Panic buying makes those two items hard to find. When you found one, its priced higher than ever.
The pandemic shifts people’s behavior from on-demand purchase, into bulk shopping, or even panic buying. Not only that, but the deep trauma of the virus might change our shopping habits to always stocking up more than we usually need, even when this whole thing is over.
Delivery apps and services are getting popular!
Since eating in a restaurant is no longer a viable option, a lot of millennial opt to order their food online. Many people think that this is an effective way to reduce the virus spread since there are fewer contacts among people.
But with more and more services getting terminated due to lockdown, many people fear that there will be no more driver left available to pick up your order.
Fewer retail stores that serve on-demand purchases
Still connected to point number two, with more customers do bulk-shopping, it makes the store limit the customer who wants to buy retail. The other impact is the store will reduce the non-essentials inventories to fulfill the essential demands, such as food staples and household needs.
In the future, retail businesses and manufacturers will sort out their inventory to reduce the excess stocks. To make the job easier, the use of inventory management software and supply chain management software is necessary.
The change in how retail business serves its customer
The coronavirus pandemic makes people avoid using cash and switching to cashless transactions. With cash transactions, the virus can transfer from one person to the other quickly. When people getting used to cashless transactions, we can see more retail stores and restaurants start using a POS system.
The other customer service changes that bound to happen are more restaurants start using e-menu or ordering stations to minimize human contact. It’s necessary as mitigation measures.
