With record numbers of people shopping online as the coronavirus rages on, retail companies are mining ever-increasing amounts of consumer data — but experts say this new gold rush poses fresh questions about privacy, transparency and security, NBC News reports.
From how customers browse to what they buy and how to get them to keep them coming back, retailers are doubling down on their efforts to capture and use customer-level data in increasingly sophisticated ways.
“The pandemic has obviously accelerated the tectonic shift of offline retailing to online retailing,” Russ Klein, chief commercial officer with BigCommerce, an e-commerce platform, told NBC News. “What is really clear is that it’s no longer acceptable for an offline retailer to rely solely on brick-and-mortar and it has forced retailers to recognize the value and necessity of using data.”
The coronavirus pandemic has accelerated retail into the world of online commerce by a few years, Klein said. With the holiday shopping season underway, e-commerce sales are expected to skyrocket even further. Online sales between November and December are estimated to grow by 33 percent this year compared to last year, to a record $189 billion, according to Adobe Analytics.
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