Letters | E-commerce boom will continue long after coronavirus pandemic ends

I am writing in reference to the letter, “Covid effects: why e-commerce boom may not last beyond the pandemic” (March 6). I disagree with its argument that the boom in e-commerce is a special circumstance arising from Covid-19 and that the bulk of consumers could quickly shift back to offline shopping once the pandemic ends. Rather, e-commerce is a long-standing trend and is likely to remain dominant in the future.

Undoubtedly, the pandemic has greatly reduced the number of people buying goods from physical stores and ramped up the development of e-commerce. Nowadays, online shopping has become an essential part of our lives. However, the growth in e-commerce sales has not happened all of a sudden.

The Covid-19 pandemic is a catalyst rather than the direct cause of e-commerce’s rapid growth. The pandemic has just made people more dependent on online shopping platforms. E-commerce started in the 1990s and has grown at a steady pace of 4.5 per cent per year globally. Retail e-commerce sales worldwide climbed to US$3.3 trillion in 2019 from US$1.3 trillion in 2014. In Hong Kong, the percentage of people shopping online also rose from 16 per cent in 2009 to 36 per cent in 2019.

The steady growth of global e-commerce sales shows us that the online shopping market has been expanding steadily even without Covid-19. The rise of social media has helped drive this growth. Facebook, Instagram and YouTube dominate the social media landscape and have billions of users.

Businesses have used different marketing strategies to increase their visibility via social media platforms. For example, sites use cookies to collect data about consumers’ browsing history and deploy customised ads while people browse the internet to attract their attention.

Moreover, online influencers are often invited to advertise products and promotion codes are offered to stimulate consumption. An increasing number of companies are now adopting e-commerce as their main business model – especially start-ups and small and medium-sized enterprises – and setting up online shops via social media platforms instead of a physical store because of the cost savings.