In March, when Romania declared a state of emergency, I wrote about the first lessons from lockdown. Back then it was more instinct than data. Now, after almost three months of closed homes, shuttered shops and couriers running from dawn until midnight, the picture is clearer. And for someone who launched MarketOnline in 2005, it looks almost unreal.
For a few weeks now, analysts and consultants have been repeating a line that has almost become a slogan: in a few months we went through years of digital adoption. It is not a number measured to the decimal point, it is an image. But it is an image that matches what anyone working in e-commerce can see: what we thought would take five years happened between March and May.
Customers who had never bought online showed up
The biggest change is not the volume, it is who is buying. For years, the typical customer of a Romanian online store was young, urban and comfortable with cards and phones. This spring, people who had always avoided the internet arrived: our parents and grandparents, ordering food, medicine or a present for the grandchildren for the first time. Some had help from their kids with the first order. By the second one, they often managed on their own.
This is the most important news for entrepreneurs. Someone who has crossed the barrier of the first order, and received the parcel intact and on time, is no longer the same customer. The fear is gone. And for 15 years, fear was the biggest competitor of online retail in Romania.
Groceries, pharmacies and the corner shop moved online
The categories that seemed “hard to sell online” were the first to explode. Grocery delivery had days when you could not find a single free slot. Online pharmacies had virtual queues. Restaurants that never wanted to hear about delivery apps ended up depending on them to pay the rent.
And perhaps most interesting of all, small neighbourhood shops and local producers discovered they could sell without a website: a Facebook page, a WhatsApp number, a product list and a car doing deliveries in the evening. It is not e-commerce in the classic sense, but it is a start. Many of them will build a proper online store in the coming months, because they have seen that the demand is there.
Delivery became the bottleneck
Everybody talks about websites, but this spring the problem was elsewhere: delivery. Couriers were overwhelmed, “24-hour” promises turned into three or four days, and some stores temporarily stopped taking orders because they simply could not ship them. Parcel lockers, until recently a curiosity, suddenly became very practical: no contact, no waiting at home.
An old habit moved, too. Romania has always been a cash-on-delivery country: you pay the courier, in cash, at your door. With the fear of contact and the advice to avoid banknotes, many more people paid by card online or contactless. I do not think cash on delivery will disappear, but it has lost its monopoly for good.
Who won and who struggled
It would be wrong to say that “e-commerce” won, in general. The winners were essential categories and everything connected to life at home: groceries, pharmacy, hygiene, electronics for remote work, office furniture, games, garden and DIY, home fitness. The winners were stores that already had stock, their own logistics or good contracts with couriers.
Even online, travel and ticketing dropped almost to zero, events vanished, and a good part of fashion suffered: you do not buy a wedding dress when weddings are postponed. Stores that had demand but no goods suffered too: supply chains from Asia froze exactly when demand went up. Having traffic and nothing to sell is one of the most frustrating situations in retail.
What stays after reopening and what goes back
Since mid-May, shops have gradually reopened and people have started going out again. Part of the online demand will return to physical stores, and that is normal. Panic orders of flour and toilet paper are not a trend, they are an event. Anyone building a 2021 budget by extrapolating April 2020 is creating their own problem.
What I think stays is the habit. People who discovered they can get medicine delivered, order cheese from the producer in the next village or that paying by card is easy will not forget it. They will not buy everything online, but they will buy more than before. Not all of the jump is permanent, but we are not going back to January either.
What I would do now, in June, if I ran an online store
I have built online stores, an online flower shop and, with Retargeting, a marketing automation platform for online stores. From all of that, my priorities would be simple:
- Keep the new customers. They are the most valuable legacy of this spring. You have their email addresses: send a thank-you note, a short how-to guide, an offer for the second order. Automate the welcome series. I wrote a while ago that email marketing isn’t dead, and this is the moment it shows.
- Promise only what you can deliver. Better to say “delivery in 3–5 days” and arrive in two than the other way round. A customer who waited a week without any news will not come back, however good the price. Send clear notifications at every step.
- Invest in speed and mobile. Many new customers bought from their phones, with little patience and big thumbs. A slow or complicated checkout means lost money. Look at your abandoned carts and find where people get stuck.
- Do not stock up for a temporary spike. Order carefully and negotiate smaller, more frequent deliveries with suppliers. A warehouse full of goods bought in a panic is the most expensive way to learn that demand has normalised.
- Diversify your channels. Marketplaces brought volume to many stores this spring, and that is fine. But if all your traffic comes from someone else’s platform, someone else makes the rules. Build your own audience too: newsletter, community, organic search.
- Offer payment and delivery options. Card, cash on delivery, locker, click and collect. Every extra option removes a reason to abandon the order.
A crisis that sped up something that was coming anyway
In 2009 I launched Floria in the middle of the financial crisis, and I learned then that hard times do not invent trends, they only accelerate them. Online retail in Romania was growing every year anyway. The pandemic just pressed the accelerator and brought people to the table who would otherwise have arrived in five or ten years. For anyone selling online, this is not a lottery win, it is a responsibility: now you have to convince these people that they were right to come.
What have you noticed in your store over the last three months? Do you have new customers you are trying to keep, or are you waiting to see how things settle after reopening?