The United States and the United Kingdom recently published some official statistics on the impacts that this pandemic has had on ecommerce. The above chart is from Benedict Evans and he has some more over here. It's worth a click through. What is clear is that lockdown forced a whole bunch of adoption and accelerated trends that were already underway. More people turned to shopping online. The UK went from 20% ecommerce penetration to over 30%. And the US went from 17% to about 22%. What is also clear is that grocery has demonstrated to be exceptionally resilient. Most physical retailers saw a decline in sales during lockdown. Grocery proved to be a notable exception. But what is unclear is how much of this adoption will actually stick. The UK is reporting monthly (as opposed to quarterly for the US) and already you can see signs of a possible reversion. My guess is that -- provided we don't see another major lockdown -- there will be a meaningful reversion before the trend line resumes its march.

It's interesting to think about the psychology behind this FT chart outlining consumer spending in the United Kingdom from March to early July. You can see the initial panic buying of groceries in late March (well, food and toilet paper). And you can more or less see the moment where people suddenly realized -- after working at home for a few weeks -- that their home was in desperate need of a refresh and that planting tomatoes might be a good hobby to take up given that there isn't much else to do. In case any of you are wondering, I remain well-stocked on the toilet paper front and my tomatoes are doing just fine.

Image: Financial Times

The World Economic Forum recently posted the below chart showing that 1/5 of all grocery purchases in South Korea are done online. The calculation is e-commerce revenue as a percentage of total fast moving consumer goods revenue in the country.

The explanation they give for this high percentage is that South Korea has some of the fastest and most ubiquitous internet access in the world. 

But as soon as I read this I thought to myself: This can’t be the only reason. When was the last time you really wanted to order groceries online but your internet connection was too slow? 

Also, if you look at all online shopping (not just FMCG), South Korea no longer shows up as such an outlier. So what’s happening with grocery?

Without actually knowing the market, I would imagine that there are companies in South Korea who have simply figured out how to offer a great online grocery shopping experience.

South Korea is also one of the denser countries in the world at about 513 people per km2. That would help with distribution. 

But then again, the Netherlands is also quite dense (414 people per km2). Why are they only at 2.6%? (For comparison, the US is about 33 people per km2.)

If any of you are familiar with the South Korea market I would love to hear from you in the comments. If they really are at 20%, I am surprised more people aren’t talking about this.