DoorDash dashes past competitors: Lockdowns only accelerated the rapid growth of digital restaurant marketplaces in 2020. DoorDash was a major winner and will make up more than half the US market this year.
YouTube Mall is here: YouTube is entering social commerce with its new shoppable video tags, and we think it’s likely to add full checkout functionality soon, making it a digital shopping destination.
The emergence of new companies selling direct online has been a big story for some time. Mattress brands Casper and Emma, luggage maker Away, beauty company Glossier, and garment retailer Happy Socks were among the first highly successful direct-to-consumer (D2C) firms, many of them based in Europe.
Despite a challenging year for retail in 2020, we estimate that worldwide retail ecommerce sales posted a 27.6% growth rate for the year, with sales reaching well over $4 trillion. This represents a substantial uptick from our mid-pandemic assessment that global ecommerce would decelerate to 16.5% growth and demonstrates the remarkable extent to which consumers transitioned to ecommerce last year.
Pandemic accelerates livestreaming growth in China: The format will grow rapidly at 10.6% in 2021, driven by social apps and ecommerce livestreams.