Online sales ignite in corners of world late to revolution

Bloomberg

Years from now when the pandemic’s impact on global business is analysed, it’s likely that the most lucrative change will be how it pushed—or actually shoved—massive markets into the modern e-commerce era.
In many countries, online shopping hadn’t been easy because of underdeveloped infrastructure and the reluctance, or inability, of consumers to use banks and electronic payment. That stalled growth in a lot of the world, but Covid-19’s disruption has forced rapid change.
Take Mexico, where fewer than half of adults have bank accounts and less than 5% of retail sales occurred online before the pandemic—a third of the global average. The lack of access to banking and mistrust of the financial system left it out of the online boom happening in Europe, China and the US But when stores closed to slow Covid-19, millions of holdouts moved to the web. Mexican companies responded on the fly—igniting a 54% jump in web sales—and accelerated the online ecosystem by years. This kind of upheaval also took place in other major economies, like India, Russia and Brazil, that were slow to e-commerce.
One of those new online shoppers is Miriam Sota, a 39-year-old from Mexico City. She’d been extra careful with personal data after her credit card details were stolen and used to run up a hefty bill. The fear of handing over her financial details kept her off the web until Covid hit. That’s when she needed a filter for her refrigerator and as a last resort went online where she found one on Amazon. Now she’s a convert, even buying groceries online. Covid has accelerated the shift to e-commerce everywhere, but it has the potential to be much more lucrative in countries where many more people are developing the online habit for the first time. In India, for example, e-commerce made up just 6.5% of the market last year.
To keep up, retailers in these markets are catching up to global peers by creating more secure payment systems, expanding distribution to speed delivery and expanding customer service to platforms like Facebook and WhatsApp.
Russia had been fertile ground for an e-commerce boom for years, with almost as many internet users as the UK and Germany combined, according to Euromonitor International. Covid has changed Russia. Established companies, like Wildberries and Yandex, and startups are flooding the market with investments as the pandemic has brought an estimated 10 million Russian consumers online for the first time, according to Data Insight.