If anyone thought digital, eCommerce, and online retail were big, well, it just got a whole load bigger. Since the pandemic (CV19) took hold just look at the share prices of anything connected to digital – Tesla, Canva, Upwork, Atlassian – take your pick, their share prices have skyrocketed.

Why? Because their business models, compared to many traditional businesses models, have been relatively unaffected. In many instances their businesses have thrived.

We’re not here to debate on whether share prices are overvalued, or not. What we can comment on is what we’re seeing:

• Existing online businesses and ecommerce retail increasing their footprint
• Businesses previously not online, or with a small digital footprint, aggressively increasing or improving their online presence

Kogan.com, an Australian retailer led by Ruslan Kogan, is a perfect case-in-point. Having started in 2007 his online empire is now worth $1.75 billion, with sales doubling in the last quarter.

Source: SMH – Ruslan Kogan in 2009

Then there’s Canva. The Australian tech darling (not forgetting Atlassian) founded by Melanie Perkins and Cliff Obrecht, which is now valued at $US6 billion.

Cliff Obrecht said, “despite the economic downturn as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, the company continues to see a significant increase in user activity…Now more than ever, organizations of all sizes are doubling down on building a reliable remote workplace, and are turning to modern productivity platforms like Canva to ensure they remain flexible and scalable.”

In the United States, consumer spending through non-store channels swelled 29.6% year over year during June.

While the World Economic Forum highlights digital entrepreneurs will help shape the world after the COVID-19 pandemic, sighting three key areas:

• Leveraging digital tools has become a must for entrepreneurs
• The process of digital transformation across almost all sectors has accelerated due to the pandemic
• Ability to leverage digital tools for both recovery from the pandemic and beyond, with greater social mobility and shared value creation

Demand for Online Retail & Remote Customer Support Staff

For USource, we’re at the coal face of experiencing this online shift. Demand for digital staff, in particular outsourced digital staff (rather than inhouse company employees) continues its global spread, across United States, Canada, Australia, United Kingdom and parts of South East Asia, mainly Singapore.

The areas where we have experienced strong demand to hire digital staff:

• Ecommerce support and assistance
• Customer support agents
• Platform specific customer support e.g. Zendesk, Freshdesk, Gorgias
• Hiring for dropshipping and Shopify ecommerce stores

These roles can be carried out by remote team members in centralized, or distributed (working from home) operations.

Entrepreneurs & Established Online Businesses are Hiring For…

To grow and scale businesses need outsourced workers that can work independently. For success an online business also needs the ability to grow and scale with a team, at speed and size, rather than having loosely connected freelancers with no common goal or centralized approach.

At USource, when comes to ecommerce and online retail we can work from front-to-back, from online ads right through to 24 hour customer service, answering customer questions, inventory, shipping, processing refunds, managing online marketplaces.

With Challenges Comes Opportunity, and Online Growth

There is no question businesses, employees and people in general are doing it tough world over – remembering this is a health crisis first – it’s impact will be felt by many for years to come. But within every challenge there is an opportunity, an opportunity to do things differently.

If you think it’s too late to start, or catch up, it’s not. Global ecommerce sales, online retailing and digital businesses are expected to continue growing over the next decade. We’re just at the beginning of a digital transformation for how business is done.