Offline sales fell 70%, and retailer Atlantis Seafood turned to online sales

The outbreak means consumers are shopping online more than ever. Data shows that in the past four years, the number of people shopping online in the UK has increased by 75%, and more than a third of consumers who buy groceries online are shopping online for the first time. Bord Bia, the Irish Food Agency, predicts that the number of online shoppers in the UK will increase by more than 55% in the next three years.

After the outbreak, the business of many import and export retailers was also hit hard, especially the trade of food retailers, which plummeted. On the one hand, due to the hidden dangers of viruses in frozen foods, and on the other hand, they were deeply affected by Brexit. Struggling food retailers had to turn to online to find new consumers.

Bord Bia hopes that food retailers will take advantage of this growth trend and establish new sales channels to meet consumer demand. Nicola Martin, brand expert at Bord Bia, said: "For some companies, this is a huge change because they have been selling products in the same way for a long time. We are trying to establish a new channel to ensure that e-commerce can cover the entire sales channel of food retailers."

Bord Bia is understood to be studying online sales, which is not just about building a shopping website to allow retailers to communicate directly with consumers, but also about teaching them how to use large e-commerce platforms such as Amazon, Ocado, Tesco and Alibaba to open up sales channels.

Atlantis Seafood, a seafood retailer in Wexford, UK, was founded 25 years ago and its seafood products are mainly sold to the catering industry. After the outbreak of the epidemic, affected by the closure of bars, restaurants and hotels, its transaction volume in 2020 fell by 70% year-on-year. With the help of Bord Bia, they are preparing to develop a new website to save the trade, which is directly facing consumers and responsible for delivery services.

John Kenny, head of Atlantis Seafood, once said that when the UK first started to lock down, residents asked whether it would support "telephone ordering and home delivery", and now this business has finally been realized.

John Kenny excitedly stated, "E-commerce is a real growth area, so we are turning to online sales and delivering seafood products nationwide with the help of automated packaging." In addition, Atlantis Seafood even started taking orders on Facebook and delivering them to customers' homes.

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