Consumers across Italy, Spain, and France are discovering online shopping due to COVID-19 lockdown
Southern Europe shifts to online grocery shopping amid COVID-19. Source: shutterstock.com
According to Ecommerce News, the increasing number of retailers are going online to sell their products, since consumers are currently into ordering groceries online.
For instance, the French-based startup Ollca helps local butchers, fishmongers, and greengrocers to sell their products online. This way, over the past 3 days, sales on the marketplace had been as high as during the Christmas period. Besides, the platform added 20 new vendors as well.
Meanwhile, online orders for home delivery in France have increased 32% year-on-year in the first week of March, whereas click-and-collect orders grew 29% during the same period.
At the same time in Italy, the number of online customers of supermarket chain Carrefour had doubled to 110,000.
As to Spain, some consumers are expecting they will need to stay at home for quite some time. According to that fact, their shopping behavior has changed. The major department store El Corte Inglés reveals there’s a big increase in demand for products like fridges, large freezers, children’s toys, and smart TVs.
However, due to the major shift to online, a lot of websites have been slow and orders have failed at checkout. This way, the retail store chain Esselunga had restricted orders in Milan to one per week. And since the large number of people shopping at the physical Mercadona supermarkets in Spain, the company has stopped taking online orders in most of the country.
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