Customers’ behavior related to Covid-19

As the coronavirus continues to spread around the world, there have been significant changes to consumer behaviour, in-store shopping, priorities, and factory, and online shopping.

The capital gain estimates for retails in 2020 will be affected by COVID-19 forecasts, but impacts are uneven. Fashion, furniture, and electronics retailers will be hit hardest as consumers purchases in favour of stocking up on food and household supplies. Grocers win, but at a higher cost of operations, and demands for online deliveries.

Retail technology will continue to put their efforts now at online shopping, as retailers reserve the investments by reducing spending on the store and interacting face to face. The situation is rapidly changing. Restaurants, movie theatres, and gyms in many major cities are shutting down. Meanwhile, many office workers are facing new challenges of working remotely full time.

Primarily, people are coming to terms with the separations from other people a vast impact to say that we are living in unprecedented times feels like an understatement.

One of the responses we’ve seen to how people are approaching this period of isolation and uncertainty is in massive overnight changes to their shopping behaviours. From bulk-buying to online shopping, people are changing what they’re buying, when, and how. Paul Marsden, a consumer psychologist at the University of the Arts London, was quoted by CNBC as saying: “Panic buying can be understood as playing to our three fundamental psychological needs.” These needs are autonomy (or the need to feel in control of your actions), relatedness (the need to think that we are doing something to benefit our families), and competence (the need to feel like smart shoppers making the correct choice).

These psychological factors are the same reasons “retail therapy” is that when you are in stress, you tend to shop more and since the only option available is doing it online.

Also; there is the crowd mentality. When we see people buying up the shelves and then seeing the essentials are disappearing from the store, we will decide to stock up. No one wants to be left behind without any resources.

Depending on the industry and audience, the response to the situation change. And every market knows its consumers better than the others.