Is COVID-19 ecommerce’s tipping point?

The imminent demise of traditional retail has been predicted many times over the past decade, with online shopping and ecommerce giants being the prime suspects in its murder. Since 2017 the number of these predictions have dramatically increased, with a plethora of published articles all declaring that e-commerce has reaching its ‘tipping point’. However, despite this doom-mongering, many traditional retailers remain and have been – until recently – reporting healthy sales figures, albeit with reduced levels of profitability. But could the black swan of the COVID19 pandemic be the final nail in the coffin for physical retail? To understand this let’s first evaluate what is meant by a ‘tipping point’? A quick Google brings up the following definition: the point at which a series of small changes or incidents becomes significant enough to cause a larger, more important change.” So a tipping point from a retail perspective means the point