 How online sales is affected by world events? Are you concerned about how this pandemic is going to affect your business? Well, you should be. In this video, I'll talk about what's already happened, what's likely to happen, and what you can do to protect your business. And we're starting right now. Hey, I'm JR Fisher. I've been selling online since 2009. I've sold millions of dollars of both digital and physical products. And on this channel, all I do is share with you ideas to help you start, run, and grow your online business. And don't forget, make sure you subscribe below. Go ahead and click the notification bell. Turn on all notifications so you don't miss a single video. And I can let you know when I put up a new video. Now, have you been concerned about this pandemic that's going on? Everybody is. What's going on with your business? Put it in the comments below. How do you think it's going to affect you? Or if you have any questions, put that in the comments below and give me a thumbs up. Okay, let's check it out and see what it's going to do to your business. Okay, in the short term, people who sell like medical supplies and toilet paper and paper towels, their sales are going to go up. But long term, the question is what's going to really happen? As the coronavirus went around the world, everything was affected. Concerts and large events and shopping and restaurants. I mean, the list is endless as to how many businesses it actually affected. Now, long term, we really don't know what's going to happen. It's all a big guess. Now, obviously, short term, it's going to interrupt the supply chain and products from China are going to slow down. Or if we're even going to buy products from China in the US now, manufacturing may even change. We may even bring back the manufacturing to America. In a survey conducted in March of 2020, 47% of retailers said that their business was affected negatively. Now, another 33% said it's really too early to tell. 58% were pretty sure that it was going to affect the consumer confidence and 22% felt like it might affect the consumer confidence. Now, why this matters is because consumer confidence is the one thing that affects the economy more than anything else. Now, based on 5.5 million of anonymous aggregated website visits, 58% increase in sales overall online and 8.8% increase of people who actually shop online. Check out some of these statistics. Mask sales increased 590%. Hand sanitizer sales increased 420%. Clorox, Lysol wipes, whatever you want to call them, their sales increased 184%. Disinfectants increased 178%. Glove sales increased 151%. And bottled or packaged water sales increased 78%. Not to mention sales were up for vitamins, tissues, hand soap, toilet paper, and paper towels. Now, according to one mask retailer, DebriefMe, they say that the influx of sales for coronavirus has spread throughout their company. DebriefMe sells their products on a site called DebriefMe, Go Figure, with 89 different SKUs. Now, most of their products are coming from China and they are fulfilled by Amazon. But they did mention their sales have grown 10 times since this pandemic started. But they are moving production to a factory in New York now. The problem is they have 11-person staff and they're fielding 200 to 300 customer inquiries a day. Now, here's a look at their website right here. DebriefMe also is looking to expand its mask line to 10 different products and it plans to sell its mask in big box retail stores. But the owner declined to specify which ones. He says, we are getting calls from retail stores and talking to most of the big box stores, but we're aggressively expanding worldwide. Not all retailers actually did good because of this though. Some of them had increase in sales if they were online, but if they were freestanding stores, their sales all but dried up. Now that some of the factories are coming back online in China, that supply chain is ramping back up again, but will there be a demand for Chinese products? We really don't know yet. Now, some sites like Etsy said that they were really not affected by the coronavirus and the supply chain because most of the products on their sites don't come from China. They're actually handmade. Eric Nordstrom of the big department store, Nordstrom said that definitely their fourth quarter earnings would be affected. Now, even though their private label products make up about 10% of their overall sales, only 30% of those are coming from China. Stores like Target said that they saw a huge demand for cleaning products and protective gear. And big stores like Target said they're changing the way they clean things. Every 30 minutes, touch screens are now cleaned and they limit the number of people that can actually come into the store. Now the truth is your sales and how you react to what's going on in the world will have the biggest impact on your business. You need to start catering to the way people are going to be buying now, making it more convenient for them. I mean, I know I never ever bought online groceries before and I got to tell you my last four or five. Well, I haven't bought any groceries in a grocery store since this thing started. I've been using Instacart. Instacart can bring the groceries to me and it may actually change my buying habits. And I think you're going to see this with a lot of businesses because whereas I would have never, ever paid somebody to go grocery shopping for me, now that I've tried it and I see the ease of it, it is something that I'll consider the next time I need to get groceries when all this is over with. Also, you got to remember that when this is over with, it's not going to be immediate change back to the way it was. It is going to have some profound long-term effects on your business. Now, if you're an online retailer like us, we sell survival food. And I think overall our sales will probably increase just for the fact that people realize that survival food is not such a crazy idea now. There were shortages during this of which I wrote a book on that called Great American Food Shortage and people never really thought that could happen. They were always dependent upon their grocery stores and running down and getting exactly what they want. And now that they understand that those interruptions can happen and there can be food shortages, I think they're going to be more likely to buy survival food from us. So overall, it's going to help us. Now, what about the consumer at large out there? Well, the consumer at large is going to be very leery about going out into crowds, I think at the beginning. I think it's going to be really hard for people to sell concert tickets or theater tickets or any of that once this thing is over with. And some people will probably steer away from those things altogether. I don't know what it's going to do to the movie industry, but a lot of people started getting streaming services. They hooked up to Netflix or YouTube TV or HBO and they watched it in the comfort of their home and they probably say to themselves, well, the cost of HBO for a month, which is I think $14.99, is less than two people going to the movie theater. And movie theaters need those people in there because at movie theaters, the majority of their profits are actually coming from concessions. Without those concession sales, they're just not going to be able to make it. So that could actually change the landscape. Not to mention the fact that so many small businesses like restaurants and hair salons and that type of thing may not be able to reopen. They may not be able to weather the storm of not having an income for three or four months. Those people actually may be looking for jobs. But then it takes you over to the people who were laid off in a lot of those jobs and maybe they're now looking to make money online. They want to do at home work on a computer. I know we've had a big increase in interest for our courses, for people who want to make money online. So I think a lot of people are going to switch over to that. Now, there's certainly jobs out there that are never going to change. You know, you've got to get your car fixed. But even if you've got to get your car fixed, how often you have to get it fixed is dependent upon how much you drive it. And if you're starting to order more stuff delivered, if you're starting to have more stuff brought in, if you're starting to work from home and not drive to work, how much do you need the cars? And then it flows down again. You know, well, then if you don't use your car as much, you're probably not going to buy as many cars. Will it affect the automotive industry? So there's so many factors that we don't even know yet. We don't know how the public's going to react. But I would say if you're in any type of business, if you can make it more convenient for your customer, whether it's a car shop, you know, dropping off the car and picking it up, that type of thing, that's going to make people more likely to use your car shop over one that they get a drive to and sit in a lobby with other people. So think about what you can do to make things more convenient for people. And, you know, we've all seen the proliferation of these apps where they deliver, you know, lunch and dinner and breakfast and your groceries and whatever it is you need. And those businesses, I think, are going to really thrive. So overall, we're going to change. We don't know how much. I do know that if you can make it more convenient for your consumer, make it more convenient. Make it so that, you know, dealing with you is easier than anybody else then you'll probably thrive in the coming years. So I hope you enjoyed this video. I would love it if you could just subscribe, hit that big subscribe button down there. Don't forget to bell, turn on all bell notifications. That's super important too. And what else? What else I got for? I got a free course. If you'd like a free course, there is a $97 course that you can get absolutely free by just opting in below. Don't forget, $97 course right below. Just click the link and learn no credit card required. Thank you so much for listening to this video and I'll see you in the next one.