A survey conducted by Blue Wonder has found that consumers across Europe and North America are embracing safe shopping online in larger numbers than ever before, with the impact of coronavirus the root cause of this trend.

64 per cent of Europeans said that they were focusing more of their spending on e-commerce sites, while 74 per cent of those from North America admitted to increasing their online shopping activities.

Interestingly enough, there are still a lot of people who are intending to return to bricks and mortar stores when they are able, once lockdown conditions and national restrictions on non-essential retail outlets are lifted.

A fifth of European respondents said that they were likely to take trips to real-world grocery stores in the future, while almost a third said that they would be cutting back on visits to retail locations dealing in other types of products.

This is nevertheless a fairly significant finding in that it suggests that bricks and mortar retail will likely see a sizeable minority of shoppers stop visiting as regularly. At a time when footfall figures were already declining and the internet was soaking up a lot more consumer spending, this will put plenty of high street retailers in precarious positions.

Report spokesperson JoAnn Martin said that the uptick in online grocery orders was helping a variety of brands to attract fresh shoppers who would normally have done most of their food shopping at physical outlets. She also said that even with the growing interest in online shopping created by the current pandemic, it was important for e-commerce operators to ensure that customer experiences were top-notch or else they could risk putting off newcomers.

It seems that even with many countries choosing to ease lockdown measures at this time, the increase in online shopping will not subside.