Giving Online Shopping a New Meaning

By Christopher West

JRN 100 Staff Writer 

While the pandemic hit many small businesses hard, a recent study found that online businesses saw growth in sales and jobs.

As it became more dangerous to be in-person shopping with all the unknowns of the virus, Americans turned to online shopping as an alternative to shopping in person. More than ever, companies like Amazon boomed in sales. Over 220% in total net sales from the years 2019 to 2020, according to the New York Times.

According to PNAS: Impact of Covid-19 on Small Businesses, small, family-owned businesses took the hardest hit during these times. This study was conducted from over 5,800 small businesses across the United States. Using the Alignment platform to perform this study, a consensus on various statistics were found during this three-year period.

As a result of this study, small businesses did not have an online storefront, which ultimately led to the closing of many doors during the first months of the pandemic.

Barry Foley who has written multiple books on Small Business success including “How to Get Unstuck”, talked about the comparison of both small businesses and larger corporations from March 2020 to the end of the year had performed.

“On a larger scale, bigger corporations that had in-person retailers such as Target and Walmart boomed with online shopping on the rise. They all implemented curbside pickup and other product drop off location sites, which eventually led to restaurants and small businesses taking notice” Foley said.

On average, over 10,000 dollars alone were the monthly expenses for these businesses, along with having to temporarily lay off employees. In most cases, there was no outlet for these small retailers to put out their products and had to make some hard decisions to temporarily close their business or for good. In the quarterly overview, owners of businesses only had enough money to last only One and a half to Two Months.

 “Across the sample, 41.3% of businesses reported that they were temporarily closed because of COVID-19. A far smaller number—1.8%—reported that they were permanently closed because of the pandemic. By contrast, only 1.3% reported that they were temporarily closed for other reasons; 55.5% reported that they were still operational”, the study said.

During these times when money was getting tight, more than 20% of Small Businesses reached out to an external, online platform to sell their products on a separate, worldwide scale.

During this Study, almost 55% of 5,800 businesses also believed that the pandemic would only last about two months. Over 70% of respondents to the study took advantage of aid that was given through the Paycheck Protection Program, a fund to aid small businesses on the verge of closing.

One young platform that has flourished as a result of this is Shopify, which has taken small business retailers, and turned them into successful businesses with their own platform, without the process of being distributed to larger corporations.

This created a unique opportunity for struggling small businesses during the pandemic, which was a hard time for families to provide for their families in most cases.

Popular brands like AllBirds, Untuckit, and GymShark have also taken the distribution of their products, and created their main platforms through Shopify.

But this is not exclusive to these brands who have taken to Shopify. When looking the website, you can create and customize an online store, as well as sell to the online marketplace.

Ryan Pantaleo, an E-Commerce developer of Shopify talked about how they have empowered both aspects of online shopping and supporting small businesses all in one. He talked about his job, and how he runs his sector of business.

“I manage a team of Nine team members, Five clients in the United States and Four in Canada. We give out our platform for small businesses. We give small businesses the E-Commerce platforms that they need to sell their products on the digital marketplace,” said Pantaleo.

“Shopify’s E-commerce Platform has empowered small business entrepreneurs to move their platform beyond their storefront and other social media handles. Not only can you shop and put out your product to our website, but you are also able to post about your product, much like Twitter. This has created jobs to assist our platform and overall, it has had great feedback from both customers and producers”, said Pantaleo.

As we hear from Pantaleo, retailers grew with some new opportunities over time, as most consumers were encouraged to help their favorite local small businesses during the first months of the Pandemic.

Giving small businesses an online platform allows for online exposure, along with the opportunity for creative webspace for their products. This also makes it easier for businesses to have an easier outlet for other business opportunities, as well as a way of contact to direct sellers.

Through the trial and error of the early pandemic, a bunch of unknowns came about including the total number of U.S. Citizens still being employed through their small business employers.

In 2020, Employment declined on average of 27% for firms with less than 500 employees and about 28% for firms with less than 50 employees between mid-February and mid-April. These numbers are somewhat smaller than the 39% decline in employment for small businesses that we find but higher than the estimates of the Atlanta Fed survey, according to PNAS’s study.

With the bigger picture of the United States as a whole “post-pandemic”, the overall business survey consensus has stated that unemployment rates have decreased by almost 40% collectively from March 2020 to March 2023.  This rate is for the whole United States, with Texas, California, and Massachusetts seeing the biggest decreases in unemployment in both full-time and part-time jobs.

Ultimately, the United States gained back all the employment that was lost during the first months of the pandemic, almost three years later in 2023. As a result, consumers are finding more satisfaction in online shopping.

The economy and jobs have had quite ups and downs in the last three years. With time, less social distancing, and fewer pandemics, things are on track to remain relatively normal again.