‘In North America, amid e-commerce growth, clothing sales are about to decline in 2020 by 30% and in 2021 by 25% from the 2019 levels,’ said McKinsey & Company. The earliest clothing sales could rebound to pre-pandemic peaks by the first quarter of 2023 according to Althea Peng, president, McKinsey’s-Americas. If the adverse conditions remain until next year, stores will be languishing until the second quarter of 2025.
While the market share in online purchases will increase, the fall in brick and morter purchases will not be compensated for. More than one-third of gross fashion revenues will be online transactions by 2020. In 2021 the penetration of e-commerce will decrease considerably, as businesses reopen all year. In 2019 to 2021, a significant rise in e-commerce revenue will be offset mostly by declining sales of brick and mortar. In 2021, the number of first-ever digital labels and retailers is expected to rise 25% from 2019.
But, while customers don’t see on-line platform usage after the contagion as a threat, Emma Spagnuolo, a McKinsey Associate, believes the readiness of consumers to shop clothes and shoes online after the pandemic has only jumped by a quarter.
In addition, Spgnuolo is experiencing 35-40% growth in Omnichannel consumers, such as online ordering, ordering and buying via social media or applications – post-COVID-19. According to her, active e-commerce retailers approach from two angles: the harvesting of greater traffic by expanded customer engagement and transfer and the overloading of lucrative operations through finding means of minimizing expense across the system , better data efficiency and encouraging proper cost distribution for clarification and consistency outside of conventional legacy models.
