Our Face-to-Face Shopping Is Harming Big Tech


This online shopping decline is not limited to a single company. Other e-commerce stars including Etsy and ShopifyIts software that powers online businesses for millions of small stores also recorded unexpectedly low sales growth or low prospects for the near future. An analysis from Mastercard It showed that online shopping purchases in the US fell in March for the first time in nearly a decade, while in-store purchases increased.

It’s no surprise that e-commerce purchasing is soaring back in 2020 as people stay home naked and many people feel more comfortable shopping and are again willing to splurge on travel, dining out, and other face-to-face activities. But companies haven’t really seen this pendulum swing coming.

Facebook’s parent company, Meta, said in a statement last month, suddenly meh ad sales This was partly because online shopping companies were less willing to buy ads on Facebook when their sales were under pressure. “The acceleration of e-commerce has led to massive revenue growth, but now we see that trend returning,” Mark Zuckerberg told Meta investors two weeks ago.

And Meta said last week slow down hiring.

Six months or a year ago, Meta, Amazon, Google, and other tech companies looked crazy with all this cost cutting and insecurity about the future. tremendously bonkers income and profits.

The question this raises is whether we misjudged the technology-driven changes in consumer behavior over the past two years. Yes, some of us will continue to get into the habit of doing more shopping from home and Zooming everything. But died Back to 2019 behaviors, more. I shook hands with everyone at a business meeting last week and wondered what happened to the virus’s prediction that they would end the handshake.

We still don’t know what “normal” looks like in the US or elsewhere, and we probably won’t know for a year or more as our spending habits adjust to higher prices, ongoing difficulties with manufacturing and shipping, rising interest rates, continuing. coronavirus infections and the desire to have fun in the real world.

The new normal of shopping doesn’t look like the return of physical stores we’ve seen in the last six months, nor the increase in online shopping from 2020. The collective behavior of millions of Americans is difficult to predict. And that makes all technology vibrate.



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