Ecommerce Was By Far the Biggest Retail Trend of 2020

It was a wild year for U.S. retail, from panic buying and toilet paper shortages to QSR chicken sandwich wars and bankruptcies aplenty, including storied brands like Brooks Brothers and Neiman Marcus, as well as mall staples like JCPenney and J.Crew.

However, for retail’s biggest players, Amazon and Walmart, 2020 was an excellent year.

Online grocery and curbside pickup started to go mainstream—although Amazon struggled (albeit briefly) to adjust to the abrupt shift in consumer demand early in the year. Amazon also faced warehouse worker walkouts and fallout when internal comments about fired employee Chris Smalls went public. Other 2020 Amazon highlights include the launch of a Counterfeit Crimes Unit to help root out knockoffs and the filing of select lawsuits against bad actors.

This was also the year Amazon opened its first Fresh grocery store with smart shopping carts; the ecommerce giant also launched prescription delivery and a hand-scanning payment option. CEO Jeff Bezos made his Congressional debut, and Prime Day became a fall event intended to kick off an earlier-than-ever-before holiday season.

Meanwhile, Walmart debuted its membership program, Walmart+, to mixed reviews and partnered with ecommerce platform Shopify to grow its own third-party marketplace and TikTok to test the waters of social commerce. The retailer also hosted drive-in movies, virtual summer camp and socially distant trick-or-treating for quarantining families.

And, even though it feels like a lifetime ago, 2020 was also the year Walmart aired its first in-game Super Bowl commercial.

But retail in 2020 was much more than just Amazon, Walmart and bankruptcy filings. We asked analysts for their takes on the year’s biggest trends—here’s what stood out to them in a very unconventional year for the retail industry:

‘The winner of 2020’

The most prominent trend is—without a doubt—explosive growth in digital commerce.

Media company GroupM’s first-ever ecommerce forecast noted a “new plateau for newly accelerated future growth.”

Jeff Malmad, executive director and lead at Shop+, a unit focused on retail and ecommerce at media agency Mindshare, pointed to internal research that found 62% of Gen X and 44% of Boomers are shopping online more now than before the pandemic.

Similarly, Greg Mercer, CEO of Amazon seller platform Jungle Scout, pointed to data that shows 34% of consumers spent more online in Q3 even as their overall spending dropped. And—no surprises here—he called Amazon the clear winner as 70% of consumers surveyed shopped there in Q3 versus 35% on Walmart.com and 26% on Target.com.

Per Audrey Low, managing director of international accounts at Mindshare China, the shift toward ecommerce, as well as other preexisting trends like curbside pickup and syncing up in-store stock with retailer websites, is here to stay.

“Rather than acting as a change agent for brands’ long-term strategies, Covid-19 served as an accelerant, ensuring that three-year business growth and transition plans were actioned in just six months,” she said.

The shift to omnichannel continues

Another 2020 trend was retailers pivoting to omnichannel retail. We saw an example of this in October when Walmart announced its new test stores, which are intended to serve as real-life experiments for new technology as it seeks to transform its 4,800-store footprint into brick-and-mortar stores that double as online fulfillment centers.

“A lot of brands and a lot of retailers turned some of the local stores they had into mini distribution centers [in 2020], which puts them in a better position for 2021 than they were going to be otherwise,” Matt Moorut, principal analyst at research firm Gartner said. “From the retail perspective, the functionality to actually be able to deliver this … wasn’t necessarily in the roadmap coming in.”