How Corona Is Making Businesses Rethink

The COVID-19 crisis is currently shaking up the market. The pandemic inevitably changes our everyday life – fundamentally and permanently.

While the current crisis has many downsides, businesses are trying their hardest to use it as an opportunity as well. Our experts are convinced: Digital should now more than ever be a main pillar of corporate strategy for every company. This is also confirmed by the latest figures from a study carried out by Episerver.

Digital media, products and services have been on the rise for years. At the same time, a large number of companies have primarily remained in the physical, traditional market. But all of this changed in spring of 2020: the restrictions caused by the spread of the coronavirus are changing the shopping behaviour of consumers around the globe at lightning speed. This development caused a lot of disruption in places where digitisation projects are only hesitantly approached. Much pent-up demand was revealed – here in Germany, too.

With clear figures, the LinkedIn article “The Case for Digital Is Over” by Episerver CEO, Alexander Atzberger, quantifies what we have observed as well: the physical core business has fallen by at least 20 %, in some industries it is up to 80 %. Meanwhile, corporate earnings on digital channels increased by at least half on average – in some cases by up to 500 %. This trend can be seen in pretty much every sector and holds great potential for the future.

So far so good. However, this poses a bigger problem, because the total turnover of many companies is still falling. This is quite simply because the new income via the digital channels cannot balance out the high loss in the traditional ones. The solution is obvious: digital channels must be strengthened in order to meet the changing needs. In the digital transformation, however, there is not only the potential to compensate for the losses caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, but also a potential to increase turnover beyond the crisis.

Now it is time for entrepreneurs to start acting. It is important not to fall into a state of shock and accept the negative effects of the crisis. While the whole world seems to be waiting for a time after corona, we recommend entrepreneurs to take action immediately and actively shape the future. That is only possible – on that our digital experts wholeheartedly agree with Alexander Atzberger – with sustainable concepts for digital change, especially in the area of ​​e-commerce.

Our COO, Chris Köhler, has been observing the digital market closely for twenty years. He is certain: digital is the most important basis for entrepreneurs to future-proof their business. This also applies to businesses and sectors that have so far believed to not be able to benefit much or at all from a digital transformation. And all of this is all the more true since COVID-19.

Once the pandemic will have been contained, it would be desirable if stationary trade could return to its original strength and if at the same time we could fully exploit the many advantages and potentials of digital. However, since nobody can predict developments in traditional retail and the figures presented by Alexander Atzberger speak for themselves, it is definitely a worthwhile goal for entrepreneurs to not hesitate any longer and to expand their digital channels. Thus, you are well prepared for every possible scenario the future may hold.

As the so-called digital natives grow up, e-commerce must also grow up with them in order to offer its users the personalised customer experiences they expect. A thoroughly constructed cloud transformation offers business-critical web projects the stability they need, all the while being state-of-the-art and resource-saving. Whether it’s content commerce, AI or high-performance web shops – these channels are the only way companies can survive in the future.