 How e-commerce changed due to the 2020 illness. Yeah, I don't think it's too soon to say that that illness that went around the world will be one of the defining things of 2020. And we went from not being able to gather at all to, you know, maybe, right? No, thousands of people couldn't gather. And then they said, you know, well, you know, a couple of people can gather and now there's 10 and maybe 100. It's kind of getting back to normal, but it's going to have lasting effects. The way people shop, the way people think, all these things have changed all because of 2020. In this video, I want to go through all those things and show you how you can take advantage of these things for your business and the things you shouldn't do. And we're getting started right now. Now, don't forget to subscribe below and ring the bell. Turn on all bell notifications so you're notified every single time I go live or I upload a new video. Now, obviously there's going to be a shift in the way people were thinking because there was some like panic buying, right? I mean, they were going in the stores, they were buying all the canned goods, they were buying all the meats. Forget about toilet paper. You couldn't find that anywhere. But the point being is those buying cycles, the way people reacted, the patterns they had in 2020 are going to affect them long term. But the question is, how can you use this to your advantage? Now, one thing that came out of this that I thought was really interesting is psychiatrists defined a new term called therapy buying, therapy buying, where people would go online and they would buy stuff to make themselves feel good. Now, this actually really helped e-commerce sellers because all of a sudden people are wanting to buy online. They used to be afraid of it and now they use it as something to actually make themselves feel good. The next thing you would consider is that people saw shelves empty really for the first time in mass numbers. I mean, there was always some shortages of stuff and there always will be in our supply chain. But when food is gone and they can't get food, it does something to their mentality. They understand a sense of urgency that you could actually use in your advertising too. The first group I want to look at is Gen Z and Millennials. Gen Z and Millennials, it really changed the way they thought about things. As a matter of fact, in a recent survey, they said 96% of them are going to change their spending habits based on that illness that went around the world. They are more apt to stock up on things and they're less apt to spend money on experiences and they're starting to actually look at how much money they're spending. Now, Gen X and Boomers didn't seem to affect them as much. While we look at the Millennials and we see that 50% of them are changing their spending habits, when we look at Gen X and Boomers, it seems that only 24% of Gen X will change their spending habits and 34% of Boomers. Now, here's the cool thing. If you're an e-commerce person, almost everybody polled said that they're taking another look at shopping in store. To provide them with that social distancing, a lot of them are buying online in masses at this point. So whatever you're selling online, you have a much better chance of gaining a customer now than you did a year and a half ago. Of course, look at the grocery market. I want to put a chart up, but grocery spending really soared what in what period of time it looks like. The following graph with data from Rakuten Intelligent shows a huge spike in grocery related commerce. The rest of the e-commerce seems like it might be up a little bit, but no drastic peaks and valleys. What about other e-commerce? Let's take a look at this chart I've got here and see what it's done to the spending habits. It seems like, in addition to grocery, e-commerce covers a wide number of products across several different categories. Common Thread Collective has been providing valuable data with the illness on e-commerce shopping behavior, including the chart that you're seeing now. While e-commerce performance is not generally up or down, breaking down the data by vertical tells us a bit more of the story. What about subscription services? Subscription services have soared. If you have anything that is a subscription service, you have a much better chance of selling it now to the general public than you ever did before. Now, check out this data on spending and conversion rates. It's pretty interesting stuff if you look at it here. It looks like e-commerce across a number of specific sectors monitoring and comparing data from selected businesses year to year. The graph comes from their observations and it looks like people are making buying choices based on new and ever-changing global and local circumstances. The product categories that are being purchased are also changing. Let's look at some health and safety products and what was selling. Let's check this out. It looks like hygienic and medical masks were up 300% which would be expected. What about shelf stable goods? I own a survival food company and we sell products that last for years on the shelf. We have seen a significant increase in products like that. The average household now is starting to stock up on items that they weren't able to get when the illness was really bad. Now, let's check out food and beverage. Food and beverage is definitely up but the important thing really about looking at this is how they're buying. What are their buying patterns? There's a new thing called BOPIS, right? That is buy online, pick up and store. They're starting to order online and just drive up and get their groceries. Also, apps like Instacart have seen a huge increase in usage. Check out this chart right here. ShipBob, a shipping and fulfillment partner for e-commerce stores, gathered data from 3,000 of their merchants and is tracking the data. While the chart here shows some fluctuations, the month over month increase in online sales for food and beverage, 18.8%. That is amazing. And what about digital streaming? Well, that increased and it's obvious because so many people were shut into their homes, they were looking for entertainment. Places like Netflix and Amazon and Hulu all saw huge increases in their viewership and subscriptions. Now, let's look at luxury goods and how they have been affected. Let's check out this chart right here. Vogue Business projects a potential loss as great as $10 billion for this industry in 2020 due to the illness. This is in part because luxury goods rely heavily on the Asian market's purchasing power while it has been affected from this particular illness since really last January. This chart right here kind of demonstrates that all of these brands are actually seeing the portion of their Asia and Asia Pacific plus Japan change dramatically. The next thing to be considered is fashion and apparel. How was that affected? Let's check that out. I have a chart right here I want to show you. It looks like department stores like Macy's, JC Penney's, large chains like Abercrombie and Fitch and Nike at DTC brands with some storefronts like Rothes and Everlane are all closing their physical store and experiencing losses. Stores like Patagonia are halting even their online stores to protect all workers in the supply chain. So that's a pretty interesting thing. We are all of us currently living in kind of a flood. So how can you use all of this information to your advantage? Well, you may want to take a look at the products you're selling online. If you've been leaning towards, you know, high end luxury products, you may want to go to print on demand t-shirts. If you have been selling high priced items, you may want to look at more economical items. You may want to look at items that people can use around their home. Things like cooking items and appliances for the kitchen, tools for the kitchen, woodworking, any type of hobby things. All of these things are seeing huge increases and you can use that to your advantage in your e-commerce sales. You need to think about what would people do while they are at home. Now I can tell you just my YouTube channel alone, I got so many more subscribers in the beginning of the illness because people were at home. They had to have some type of entertainment and something to do. And we kind of doubled down on that and I did even more and more videos. Currently I'm publishing five videos a week, Monday through Friday. And I'm actually doing lives too. It seems like people want some live interaction. So six days a week I'm going live and doing things to help people start running and grow online businesses. Which you are welcome to check out. Look at my live videos. You'll see a lot of those on this channel. The point being is maybe you need to make a little pivot in what you're selling online. You can take advantage of some of these trends. If you go through this video and you look at the things that are selling well and the things that aren't selling well, maybe you back off of those a little bit. I hope you enjoyed this video. I hope you got something out of it. If you did, do me a favor. Put a comment below. Maybe you have a question about this, about starting, running and growing your online business. Put your questions and comments below. I want to hear from you. I appreciate you watching this video so very much. I actually have a course below. It's a $97 course. You can get it absolutely free. 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