Recently, BBC Business News reported a dramatic rise in the demand for warehousing space to cope with the mammoth boom in online shopping. Robin Woodbridge, Head of Capital Deployment for Prologis, which owns and manages a number of huge warehouse and logistics parks across the UK, gave us this message: "I’ve been working in logistics for 30 years and I've never seen demand like this. We're building buildings speculatively, which means we haven't got a customer lined up, and we're letting them before we finish, something which doesn't happen very often."
The period of the pandemic has exponentially increased the volume of online transactions and communications both nationally and globally. These were already at very impressive levels before the pandemic struck. However, when the doors slammed shut for lockdown, businesses came to rapidly appreciate the invaluable windows of opportunity offered by the virtual world.
Hence the explosion in online retail and the urgent need for warehousing and distribution centres to store products in readiness for orders via ecommerce sites. Hence also the terrific boost in employment opportunities for delivery drivers to take these orders to their end user destinations. The shift to purchasing online has been unprecedented in the history of the internet and, most would agree, irreversible.
Is it just consumers?
Moreover, what is not generally known that there is a very much larger market in B2B than B2C ecommerce.
In the B2B ecommerce page on this website we describe how in 2019, long before any pandemic threat was identified, Yahoo Finance declared that: "More ink has been spilled and more cyberspace filled writing about business-to-consumer (B2C) ecommerce than almost any trend on the planet, But there is a segment that’s nearly twice as large, yet gets a fraction of the attention – business-to-business (B2B) ecommerce.”
The following year a Forbes article predicted an exceptional growth in the B2B ecommerce sector, stating: "It’s anticipated to be the area of largest ecommerce growth from 2020 to 2025.”
Lift-off day - 19th July
We posted an article to our website newsroom describing the post-pandemic resurgence of the UK economy predicted by leading economic sources, including the Bank of England.
We talked about "Lift Off" then and, as has now been confirmed after a nail-biting period of uncertainty, the UK government's Covid-19 restrictions will come to an end on 19th July. Lift off-day has really arrived!
The range of online methods to generate sales and create brand awareness will be powerful allies for business as the UK economy recovers to pre-pandemic levels, predicted by the Bank of England for the last quarter of 2021. BBI Brandboost will be highlighting a range of methods where businesses can reap the benefits of a powerful online presence in future articles in the run-up to and following Lift-off Day, but for now let's focus on ecommerce.
Bring on the leads, bring on the sales!
Future progress to growth and profitability will depend to a large extent on the presence companies can establish online. An ecommerce site can be an exceptionally effective way of attracting potential sales leads both nationally and globally.
With the increasing trend of carrying out business and consumer purchasing transactions online, fuelled by the pandemic restrictions, many businesses will benefit from having an ecommerce facility, either for direct purchasing or for enabling users to make online orders. This online purchasing opportunity can be offered either as a standalone site or as an added bolt-on facility to an existing company website.
Ecommerce website design, along with providing the content and marketing solutions to ensure its success, are core skills offered by the experienced and talented BBI Brandboost team. So, if you feel that our strategic, creative and technical capabilities and experience could help your business to increase its online sales potential in this extraordinary time of challenge and opportunity, please get in touch.