While this will come as no surprise to the most of us, e-commerce is here to stay and it should not be neglected as a channel to grow your product sales. What may come as a surprise to some, is that brick-and-mortar sales should certainly not be ignored. 

There is, understandably so, a high temptation to go full steam ahead with only online sales because of its low cost and small required effort to sell to your customer either through B2C or D2C. For younger small and medium enterprises, this even appears to be the only channel worth looking into. After all, the e-commerce has been constantly increasing its share of total retail sales year over year and has been accelerated in 2020 by the global pandemic and got close to 16% of all retail sales in the United States according to the US Census Bureau.

This value is stabilizing to a lower value, around 13% in the US, given the improvements with the management of the pandemic. This is true also for the UK where the share of e-commerce sales reached 35% during the peak months of the pandemic and reduced to 28% during the summer of 2021 according to statista.com.

These are impressive numbers, but they must be interpreted carefully. There is without a doubt a significant market online, but the largest share of sales is still done in brick-and-mortar locations and it remained as such despite an ongoing pandemic.

In the last year, physical retail stores sales rose back to a pre-pandemic level and have been growing by about 6% above these values since then. The pandemic has shown that traditional retailers are here to stay and those with omnichannels sales are outperforming the online only retailers as detailed in this Morning Star analysis. 

Fact of the matter is that the majority of shoppers still prefer to make their purchase inside a physical store and despite the rise of e-commerce, this preference is not likely to change in the foreseeable future. 

Given that last year, 87% of the retail sales in the US were done in physical locations and since shoppers still prefer to buy their products in an actual store, any brand looking to scale up would certainly benefit from exploring the channels at their disposal to enter their target retailers’ physical locations.

It is clear that focusing only on B2C and D2C is still not enough to scale your brand worldwide. At Tradesnest, we have a team of experts with years of industry experience that can help establish the right strategy to put your products on the retailers’ shelves.

Are you ready to grow internationally? Sign up now for free as brand on Tradesnest or book a consultancy call with one of our experts here.