94% of Shoppers State That Online Shopping Will Be Essential During the COVID-19 Crisis

Yottaa, Inc., the leading cloud platform for accelerating eCommerce, announced the publication of a new consumer survey research report titled, “The Early Effects Of COVID-19 On Online Shopping.” The research, which was conducted by Retail Systems Research (RSR) and sponsored by Yottaa, was designed to quantify the effects the coronavirus outbreak is having on US-based shoppers – and their shopping behaviors.

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RSR, an industry market intelligence firm that helps retailers make more strategic decisions about the role of information technology in their enterprise, conducted the survey of nearly 1,200 American consumers ages 18 and up in the final days of March 2020.

Key Findings

• 90% of shoppers are hesitant to shop in-store due to coronavirus
• The majority of shoppers will either not shop in-store at all or will only do so if “absolutely necessary”
• 94% of shoppers stated online shopping will be an important activity for them during the coronavirus crisis
• 45% said online shopping will be a “necessity” for them to live their daily lives during the crisis
• 93% said they expect to shop online either more (60%) or at the same level (33%) as they did before the outbreak
• The top three things respondents felt would make shopping online more difficult during the crisis: unavailable inventory; no free shipping option; slow website
• Surprisingly, only 42% of respondents felt confident that Amazon could get their online orders delivered on time
• Consumers expect to double their use of online food delivery services such as Grubhub, Uber Eats, Instacart, and Peapod due to coronavirus

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“The results of our consumer survey clearly indicate that even at a time when the vast majority of US inhabitants are not infected with coronavirus, their sense of responsibility to stop the unwitting spread of the disease is keeping them at home – causing their shopping behaviors to be drastically affected,” said Steve Rowen, Managing Partner, Retail Systems Research (RSR). “With most experts predicting the effects of this outbreak to continue for several months, it can clearly be expected that the online shopping trends exposed in this research will only increase in the days and weeks to come. As a result, store-based retailers are in for a long and difficult journey.”

RSR’s survey findings mirror the online traffic trends of many of the 1,500 eCommerce sites using Yottaa’s web acceleration and optimization software. Since the coronavirus outbreak began, many of these sites have experienced over 100% growth in online shoppers, with one site seeing a 500% uptick in traffic.

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