COVID-19 pandemic impact on e-commerce: An empirical study on the Italian online shopping

The Italian e-commerce sector experienced a significant growth during the lockdown period between March and May 2020, this expansion continues one year later. This study aims to assess whether this improvement was a coincidence or if there was a link with the fact that people had to adopt a series of behaviors to fight the spread of Coronavirus, for instance, the separation and the obligation to stay in their homes. For the purposes of this thesis, with “e-commerce” it is intended the “B2C” typology. To test the correlation between social distance and the rise in online shopping volumes, an online survey was distributed to potential online Italian consumers, belonging to different age groups and with different cultural backgrounds; furthermore, respondents were divided according to whether they were already use to do shopping online before the virus appeared, or not. The responses were analyzed using different methods including correlation with Spearman's method, linear regression, distribution analysis, using statistical software such as R and Stata. The results showed that thanks to the social distancing imposed by the presence of the Covid-19 pandemic, there has been an increase in e-commerce volumes in Italy and that consumer loyalty has been formed, resulting from a process that it consisted on the one hand of an increase in trust in e-commerce and on the other of a reduction in perceived risks thus leading consumers to have a positive attitude towards the online shopping tool, effectively increasing the volumes recorded in Italy .