CEM REPORT | Post pandemic business attention has been considerably on retail sales by global business watchers having attracted attention with performance around the industry during the pandemic. A lot of data are thrown out to give insight into the prospective growth of the industry.
Some of the recent are those published on website planet giving insight into a wide range of retail sales coverage.
Retail sales are the biggest market for sales and involve the sale of goods to the public. This could be through a retail store or eCommerce store and is different from B2B sales, which involves transactions between business suppliers and business buyers.
Retail sales are forecast to see exponential growth in the next few years, reaching an extraordinary total market size of nearly $28 trillion by 2024. This growth is fueled by a rising global population and an increasing consumer demand.
Though the world population growth rate is declining, population still grow. Every year, on the average, 140 million are born and 58 million die – the difference of 82 million people is add to the world population in a year. Going by this figure, the world population is expected to add 246 million people to its current 7.7 billion
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In-store retail will grow from $19.24 trillion to $21.4 trillion in 2024, but the key growth area is online retail. Online retail will swell 62.5% between 2020 and 2024, rising from $4bn to $6.5bn.
As we enter into the Gen Z, consumers spend more time interacting digitally than they do interacting with others in the real world. People tend to spend 20-30% more money when they interact with a brand digitally especially through social media. The impact of this is that as more people continue to embrace digital purchases, retail sales will continue to grow.
In this regard, eCommerce will see the most considerable revenue growth. Indeed, eCommerce has already snowballed over the last 2 years. A period that saw Jeff Bezos accumulate $75 billion before announcing he was stepping down as Amazon’s CEO.
Online marketplaces and other eCommerce sites will see significant growth too. So far, the projections are holding true. In the United Kingdom, online sales accounted for 35.2% of all sales in January 2021 — a national record. That figure increased from 29.6% in December 2020 and 19.5% in January 2020.
The cause? The COVID-19 pandemic, of course, forced many people online as high-street doors slammed shut. The pandemic affected direct sales as well.
Direct sales are at odds with brick-and-mortar retail methods, as some companies choose to sell their products directly to consumers rather than in-store.
In many people’s eyes, some areas of the practice are outdated. Gone are the days of fraudulent pyramid schemes and aggressive door-to-door sales tactics (think, Kirby’s infamous hoover sales methods of the 90s).
While in-store retail expects to bounce back from COVID-19, on the other side of the coin is direct-selling, which looks set to suffer as a result.
Customer concerns about one-to-one contact have damaged the direct sales market. Direct sales grew 1.2% in 2021, reaching $55bn, though the industry has shrunk, on average, 3.1% every year between 2016 and 2021.d shut. The pandemic affected direct sales as well.
