The variations in e-commerce activity impacted by COVID-19 have been extreme. On the one hand retail sales have grown by more than 40%, while the impact on the accommodation and food service sector has been to cause a decline of a similar level.

Within the B2B e-commerce sectors there have been strong, if slightly less significant, fluctuations, with most sectors declining as a result of the disruption in the end-use market. The manufacturing and transport/logistics sectors have been at the forefront of the difficult conditions in 2020.

As the COVID-19 restrictions are eased, then so the market will return to growth, and the development can be expected to exceed that of the wider economy. There will continue to be a slow trend towards the less developed website sales while modest growth will return for the EDI activity as industrial and commercial activity returns.

With less than 11% of companies currently engaging in e-commerce, there would appear to be a substantial opportunity for the wider use of the channel, though in practice many parts of both the B2B and B2C sectors offer services or products that have limited opportunity. Nonetheless, e-commerce in the B2B sector is destined to grow above the levels of the wider economy as digitisation remains a key feature of the economy, boosted by the challenging conditions posed by the pandemic.

• The fundamental differences in the impact of COVID-19 depending on the sector

• The significant further potential for e-commerce development

• The wide variation in approaches to the market

• The variation in activity between large and medium enterprises and SMEs

The first COVID-19 cases were confirmed in the UK at the end of January 2020, with a small number of cases in February. Rapidly rising case numbers led to the first national lockdown, starting on 23 March. It wasn't until 15 June that non-essential stores were allowed to reopen, followed by pubs, restaurants, hotels and hairdressers on 4 July and many beauty businesses on 13 July.

By September, it had become clear that the UK was at the start of a second wave, and social distancing measures were intensified. Continued increases in infection numbers led to Wales implementing a two-week national lockdown from 19 October, England announcing a month-long lockdown from 5 November and Scotland introducing a new five-level system of coronavirus restrictions.

Despite these restrictions, however, case numbers continued to increase. All four UK nations tightened restrictions further in January 2021, effectively leading to a full UK-wide lockdown.

On 22 February, Boris Johnson announced the roadmap to an easing of restrictions in England, starting with the reopening of schools on 8 March, followed by easing of restrictions on outdoor gatherings on 29 March, and with a hoped end to all restrictions by 21 June. The Welsh and Scottish governments also gave more details on their plans to ease restrictions, with both nations taking a slightly more cautious approach to the one planned for England.

The UK’s vaccination programme started on 8 December 2020, and with the Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna and Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccines licenced for use in the UK, the government aims to offer a first dose of the vaccine to 32 million people by mid-April.

MBD’s economic assumptions are based on the Office for Budget Responsibility’s central scenario included in its March 2021 Economic and Fiscal Outlook Report. After the fall of 9.9% over the course of 2020, the scenario suggests that UK GDP will grow by 4% in 2021 and 7.3% in 2022.

GDP isn’t expected to return to pre-COVID-19 levels until the second quarter of 2022, although this is six months earlier than the OBR forecast in November 2020, mainly because of the faster than expected rollout of vaccines.

Unemployment is expected to peak at 6.5% in the fourth quarter of 2021. As with GDP, this is more positive than the OBR’s November forecast, but the OBR does raise the prospect of long-term scarring on employment, especially in the more exposed retail and hospitality sectors.

As at April 2021, many lockdown instructions continue, though there are signs that the roadmap to coming out of those restrictions remains on course. The success of the vaccine programme in the UK has been notable in this development, but with other European countries now showing a third wave of infections, the government remains cautious in the easing of restrictions.

For the purposes of this Report, Mintel has used the following definitions:

E-commerce covers the buying and selling of goods and services, or the transmitting of funds or data, over an electronic network, primarily the internet. Statistics in this Report cover business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce and business-to-consumer (B2C) activity, but exclude consumer to consumer (C2C) sales.

Electronic data interchange (EDI) is a document standard which, when implemented, acts as a common interface between two or more computer applications in terms of understanding the document transmitted. It is commonly used by large companies for e-commerce purposes, such as sending orders to warehouses or tracking their order. It is more than mere email; for instance, organisations might replace bills of lading and even cheques with appropriate EDI messages. It also refers specifically to a family of standards.

In 1996, the National Institute of Standards and Technology defined electronic data interchange as "the computer-to-computer interchange of strictly formatted messages that represent documents other than monetary instruments. EDI implies a sequence of messages between two parties, either of whom may serve as originator or recipient. The formatted data representing the documents may be transmitted from originator to recipient via telecommunications or physically transported on electronic storage media." It distinguishes mere electronic communication or data exchange, specifying that "in EDI, the usual processing of received messages is by computer only. Human intervention in the processing of a received message is typically intended only for error conditions, for quality review, and for special situations. For example, the transmission of binary or textual data is not EDI as defined here unless the data is treated as one or more data elements of an EDI message and not normally intended for human interpretation as part of online data processing."

Before using EDI, trading partners must set up a trade agreement to define the parameters of EDI. Each partner in an EDI trade agreement must independently determine a method to translate internal data to and from EDI formatted messages. Each must agree on the communications media and arrange the method for transmitting information. This may involve several methods, such as a dedicated communications link, a virtual area network (VAN) or the internet. Each must provide for system recovery in case of failure or error, security and timely response.

There are several advantages to using EDI:

• EDI speeds the process and improves the accuracy of getting information into the user's computer system. The traditional connections between businesses are telephone and mail. Both can be slow and require human intervention. EDI uses direct links to the computer system to minimize the transmission delay.

• Direct links also eliminate the need for transcribing data into the computer. This reduces errors and saves time.

• EDI solves business problems, offers cost savings and strategic benefits and provides a competitive edge.

• EDI helps organisations improve communications and increase competitiveness, efficiency and customer service by cutting costs and maximizing productivity and profitability.

• EDI can lower costs by reducing inventory investments by timelier ordering. EDI can enable better business practices, such as "just in time" stocking. If point-of-sale data is sent directly to vendors, inventories can be monitored and orders automatically generated to minimize overstocking.

Omni-channel marketing is a multi-channel approach to sales which seeks to provide the customer with a seamless shopping experience, whether the customer is shopping online from a desktop or mobile device, by telephone, or in person at a store.