COVID-19: Business Continuity, E-commerce, E-learning and Upwords
At first, you might ask what these things have in common, but I can assure you they have plenty.
Coronavirus was officially declared a pandemic by WHO two days ago, so things just got very serious, and it’s truly impacting every aspect of our daily lives. While we can simply make slight adjustments to get through it on a personal level, that is not the case with businesses.
The impact on the economy is as undeniable as it is strong. Nevertheless, businesses need to keep running because our society depends on many of them (if not all of them to some extent).
From a business-centric perspective, most companies can take a hit and still recover, but the impact of that hit is determined by the structure they have in place. There isn’t really anything you can do to ensure your business will survive if you don’t have the right structure… Why? Put simply, nobody knows how long this outbreak is going to last.
This leads me to an important question: what sales structure do you have in place?
If you sell only physically, then you are in deep trouble; if both physically and through e-commerce, then you should be okay, especially if you have your website translated for important markets.
Unfortunately, it’s a bit too late for those who didn’t invest in e-commerce or in some form of selling or providing their products remotely.
The hit is expected to be huge. From my personal experience of living in a community that is yet to have a significant number of infected people, runs on the supermarket and on the fuel pumps and isolation are already a huge deal.
In a quarantine situation, e-commerce will be crucial, and those that have that structure in place will cash in like ever before.
- Why go to the supermarket when you can buy online and get your groceries delivered at home? Why would you buy clothes, go to restaurants or buy household items in public?
- Are you taking a presence-based course or post-graduate degree? The risk isn’t worth taking, especially when you have institutions that offer e-learning as a complement or back-up.
- Want to celebrate with a special meal over dinner? The likes of Uber Eats and Glovo are there for you, and you even have Netflix and popcorn that you bought in your online supermarket, so you can have it all: dinner and movies!
Luckily, here at Upwords we can work remotely due to our cloud-based management system, and will continue to provide content creation, copyrighting and translation to online businesses, and demand has been quite high recently.
People from other countries are buying abroad to source items that are sold out in their country. Expats who enjoyed the authenticity of street markets are now buying online in their native language. Lastly, everyone is avoiding buying from China, the superpower of online shopping, so the opportunities are excellent for those who prepared.
If you are reading this and have a mixed retail structure, combining online and offline, and have products on your website translated, you can relax and watch revenues grow or at least remain stable.
However, if you are sitting at the other end, it’s unfortunate to say, but you are in deep trouble in the short-term future, regardless of the duration of this outbreak.
If your business is down, instead of just sitting around and doing nothing, this is a good opportunity to start selling online.
It might take a while until you have things ready: selecting an e-commerce platform, creating your content and translating, but with everyone helping due to the lack of work, you can still have something ready in record time, and deal with present and future threats. Better late than never – isn’t what they say?
If you need our help to scale, give us a shout and we will help without hesitation and with full commitment.
There is always a solution and keeping positive and busy never did anyone any harm, regardless of the conditions!
