E-commerce market will settle to steady growth

Significance

The pandemic sped up the expansion of e-commerce worldwide. However, growth rates are now reverting from 26% in 2020 and 19% in 2021 towards rates closer to 10%. Shoppers still spend at least six times as much in stores as they do online in most countries.

Impacts

• As the world's digital transformation matures, e-commerce rankings will increasingly mirror the rankings by population.
• E-commerce will increasingly evolve into m-commerce, driven by uptake in emerging markets, where internet access is largely phone-based.
• Privacy issues surrounding the consumer data that e-commerce generates will be a growing concern in all markets.
• The metaverse will offer a new frontier for virtual shopping, but v-commerce's prospects will depend on the uptake of metaverses.