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Comment by nkozyra | Hacker News Reader

> During the pandemic consumer spending moved online.

I keep hearing this repeated as canon but is this quantified somehow? Did we really see a spike long enough for hiring sprees? And did it last until ... when? A few months ago?

It seems intuitive but I'd really love to see numbers.

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The Shopify layoff memo (https://news.shopify.com/changes-to-shopifys-team) has a pretty interesting graph of exactly this effect. Basically a huge leap in e-commerce adoption with a subsequent dip right back to where the pre-pandemic trend line was heading. It’s not hard numbers I suppose, but it was at least the reason shopify gave when explaining their layoffs.

> In 2021, as people began returning to their pre-pandemic shopping habits, Amazon’s revenue growth decelerated to 22 percent with nearly $470 billion in revenue. And in the first nine months of 2022 (Amazon reports results for the final quarter of 2022 the first week in February), year-over-year revenue growth decelerated all the way to 10 percent. To make matters worse, Amazon’s core retail business lost more than $8 billion during that time frame, compared to an $8 billion profit during the same period the previous year. Jassy decided Amazon’s layoffs and cuts had to follow.

https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/recode/2023/1/19/23562702/a...

Yes, there was pull-forward growth in e-commerce. Using this from Benedict Evans in 2021 because it has numbers and a good graph:[1]

> The traditional way to think about ecommerce penetration is to look at share of total retail sales, and then deduct things like car repair, gasoline and restaurants - to get to ‘addressable retail’. On that basis, US ecommerce was at 16% penetration at the end of 2019 and increased to 20% or so in 2020, adding 12-18 months of growth in a year.

[1]: https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2021/5/29/boxes-truc...

I recently spent a couple years interviewing hundreds of global F100 executives and all of them said exactly the same stuff about both B2B and B2C demand moving online during the pandemic.

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