// Online sales growth has seen slow growth so far in 2023, nearing growth levels seen pre-pandemic in 2019
// Andy Mulcahy: “It is probably fair to say that the market is a bit better off than might have been expected if there was no pandemic”
Online sales are growing at the same level as they would have without the pandemic, according to IMRG, despite the original surge in ecommerce seen during lockdowns.
Online sales surged 35% year on year in 2020 in the wake of the pandemic, however demand has declined every month since April 2021, bar a small increase of less than 1% in November last year.
This means that 2022’s online sales are just 17% higher than 2019. This equates to an average annual growth rate of 5.7%, which is in line with the 5% annual growth experienced in 2019.
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Clothing is the only category that hardly recorded any growth during 2020, but it has since grown 25% compared with its 2019 figure. Online sales growth is predicted to decline by 0.3% this year.
IMRG strategy and insight director Andy Mulcahy said: “From an online retail value perspective, we might ask: ‘Pandemic? What pandemic?’
“There was a train of thought that suggested existing trends had been accelerated by a decade in the space of a few weeks, but it has become apparent that we are creatures of habit and change simply doesn’t happen at that scale, at that speed.
“It is probably fair to say that the market is a bit better off than might have been expected if there was no pandemic; the rate of growth had been generally coming down over a period of years, so it could have run at lower than 5% per year otherwise.”
Mulcahy did point out that the cost-of-living crisis has caused “a real shift in shopping behaviour”, with conversion on retail sites dropping away markedly throughout 2022.
“If there was no Ukraine conflict, could more of that volume have been retained? We’ll never know, of course, but the impact of the lockdowns on online retail now looks like a historical blip,” he added.
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