How Brick & Mortars Should Prepare for 2021

Seeming to spare no one in its path of devastation, the coronavirus not only brought about health concerns for populations around the world, it’s wreaked havoc on the traditional brick and mortar landscape, with many filing bankruptcy and more than 8,000 retail locations going dark for good. In an industry where trends are constantly shifting to meet consumer buying behaviors, prior to 2020, many retailers were already implementing digital strategies to meet shopping preferences. However, the pandemic has accelerated the pivot toward online retail adoption, enabling these businesses to stay afloat during an incredibly challenging year.

Today, Daniel Litwin, MarketScale’s Voice of B2B is joined by Rob Van Nuenen, Co-Founder and CEO of Channable. Channable is a leading global e-commerce platform provider that offers an online tool for digital marketers, brands and online retailers to send their products or services to various marketplaces, comparison engines and affiliate platforms. Creating better data feeds, with Channable, customers can easily filter, complete and optimize their product information to achieve better results, and then, send that optimized information to any export channel of their choice. With the year wrapping up, Litwin and Van Neunen took this opportunity to look back and ahead—both a global perspective on the dramatic changes brought to the eCommerce landscape during the 2020 pandemic, and some predictions for what’s to come in 2021.

“With COVID, the ecommerce business has exploded. Everyone is ordering in nowadays; no one is going to physical shops anymore—or at least during the lockdown,” remarked Van Nuenen. “I think this was the most important leap that they had to take. And now, they also see that a lot of their revenue comes from their online presence—where it used to be maybe 10% to 20%, now it’s up to 50% or even more in their whole business model.”