Companies have all experienced it over the past 18 years.erst months: the inability to open their doors has considerably reduced their turnover. For businesses that had not yet made the big leap into the digital sphere, the health crisis has often accelerated the move to e-commerce. But how did they put it into practice?
With just over 200,000 players in France in 2021, e-commerce is definitively anchored in the consumption habits of the French. The connected enterprise has become a standard and is definitively changing purchasing behavior while allowing access to numerous services.
Following waves of confinement and the forced closure of a number of so-called “non-essential” physical sales locations, the health crisis, acting as a revelation, will have at least contributed to an unprecedented acceleration in the growth of online sales. .
SMEs (with fewer than 250 employees) are the first companies affected by these upheavals. Christian Delabre, marketing expert for ORSYS, talks to us about the challenges of e-commerce for SMEs.
A change in consumption habits towards e-commerce
Between increasingly efficient technological tools and the need not to frequent “physical” stores, the health crisis has initiated a significant change in consumption habits.
In one year (April 2020-April 2021), the growth in sales (around 15 1TP3Q) brought the overall turnover of e-commerce to 130 billion euros. Or 13.4 1TP3Q of retail trade (source: FEVAD 2021). It is a success that can be explained in particular by the growing use of smartphones and tablets in the act of purchasing. And this is partly thanks to more advanced technologies but also more security on these tools. Indeed, a large part of purchases today are made from a mobile device. This effectively discriminates against all companies on the digital issue.
Alongside this surge in online ordering, the click and collect has spread widely. Favored by the impossibility for businesses to open, it allowed companies well established locally (particularly in the B to C field) to discover sales techniques that had hitherto been little or not implemented at all and to begin a real process of transition to digital.
Generally speaking, consumers have very quickly adapted their habits. They used existing possibilities: more local food consumption, fewer physical points of sale, etc. Businesses just had to invest in these opportunities.
E-commerce, on the rise
For many SMEs, the digital transition has become essential to maintaining or continuing their activity. But adapting to this new context is not without difficulty.
Indeed, facing giants like Amazon, the big winner in the face of the pandemic and whose profits tripled in 2021 (Digital Century, 04/30/2021=, SMEs are torn between a feeling of helplessness and a strong desire to succeed.
However, according to LSA in its July 2021 edition, with its omnipresence on the global e-commerce market, the market place of Amazon has enabled 13,000 French SMEs to sell their products and benefit from national and international visibility (for 65% of them) which they would not have benefited from otherwise.
According to E-commerce mag, these market places (Amazon, Ebay, MisterGoodDeal, Rue du Commerce, etc.) are popular with 52% French consumers. Hence the growing interest of traders in this concept. This is an important awareness: digitalization plays, more than ever, a role in the competitiveness of businesses. Merchants are becoming e-retailers. And it is to support this transition that the public authorities have deployed a plan to support the digitalization of businesses (clique-mon-commerce.gouv.fr, Paylib, etc.).
Acceleration of digital transformation
According to an OpinionWay study carried out in April 2021, 61 % SMEs with more than 50 employees consider that they are digital because they have a website. But digital transformation does not stop at simply having a merchant site. It requires developments and therefore dedicated budgets to improve communication, customer experience and attachment to the brand.
If companies have understood the benefits of digital transformation, there are still many areas for improvement. Indeed, navigating the digital world requires very specific codes and skills. Properly implemented, they contribute largely to the success of an e-commerce and its visibility. Developing a digital showcase requires particular vigilance over the entire “digital life” of companies: accessibility, e-reputation, cross-channel strategy, referencing, order tracking, delivery times, responsiveness, customer satisfaction, etc.
To summarize, a site alone does not support a company's e-commerce, it is only its showcase.
The creation of increasingly accessible sites
The website alone is not a guarantee of success. Nevertheless, it remains a very important channel in an e-commerce strategy. Today, the evolution of technologies makes it possible to create a merchant site in an extremely simple, quick and economical way while meeting the needs of the company as closely as possible. The use of these technologies does not require in-depth technical knowledge: they are truly accessible to everyone.
The Shopify platform, for example, allows the development of a merchant site in a few clicks. For a monthly subscription of between 25 and 250 euros (depending on the options chosen), you benefit from unified management of the different sales channels (Internet, physical stores, etc.).
Other platforms are also very efficient such as WooCommerce or Magento but require a minimum of development knowledge.
E-commerce: big winner of the crisis
E-commerce is the big winner from this crisis (excluding the tourism and air transport sectors). The distribution sector has even experienced extraordinary growth.
Many SMEs have nevertheless been able to seize this opportunity to build sustainable models for their future strategic development. This crisis has notably enabled them to make a radical transition towards new growth drivers by playing on the complementarity between e-commerce and traditional commerce.
For example, the catering sector, heavily impacted at the start of the pandemic and traditionally quite distant from the digital world, was able to quickly bounce back by offering new services with order taking, collection at the point of sale and home delivery.
In this state of mind, multi-starred chef Anne-Sophie Pic (already very active in the digital world), created Daily Pic, a French-style “fast-good” brand. The platform plays on two essential elements: practicality and sustainable development.
There is no shortage of successful examples of SMEs (all sectors combined) having developed a digital strategy. The success of e-commerce is therefore not about to run out of steam.
Train yourself, rethink your strategies, adapt to new markets, respect your customers, constantly innovate, dare… And as Richard Branson says: “You have to give a damn, and go for it”.
