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Research lines on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on business. A text mining analysis

Patricia carracedo, rosa puertas, luisa marti.

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Received 2020 Sep 24; Revised 2020 Nov 19; Accepted 2020 Nov 21; Issue date 2021 Aug.

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COVID-19 has brought about a marked slowdown in global economic development. Companies have been forced to adopt new managerial guidelines to adapt to the difficult conditions and to survive in this “new normal”. The recent and still scarce literature in this field seeks to provide suitable solutions to prevent irreparable disruption and help strengthen business, but does not apply advanced statistical methods to that end. The aim of this paper is to identify the current research lines developed around COVID-19 and their impact on the business environment, applying text mining methodology. The analysis, which uses statistical software R, focuses on systematic review of studies published in prestigious journals of business and marketing areas. In light of the results obtained, three different areas of intervention were identified. The common thread that runs through all of them is the need to introduce new forms of action to improve citizens' quality of life.

Keywords: COVID-19, Text mining, Cluster, Business, Marketing

1. Introduction

The rapid spread of COVID-19 meant that in little over three months the whole world was struggling to curb not only the disease but also the harsh economic consequences of the measures taken to do so. Governing authorities in almost all countries were forced to limit the free movement of the population both nationally and internationally, bringing the economy to a total standstill ( Nicola et al., 2020 ). This situation has underscored the fragility of the foundations of the 21st century economy, which is characterized by major technological advances and remarkable globalization, centred around globally interconnected production chains seeking maximum profitability.

The lockdown measures led to widespread economic collapse with significant repercussions on production and employment, and a severe impact all branches of activity due to the sharp decline in consumption. The most developed countries have seen their positive economic growth dip into the red with marked rises in unemployment and an increase in social inequalities. Comparisons are inevitable: some go so far as to equate the uncertainty generated by this pandemic with that caused by the Great Depression of 1929–33, and far exceeding that associated with the financial crisis of 2008–09.

Companies face an unprecedented challenge. Their survival depends on the adoption of management strategies that will allow them to overcome the sharp drop in orders and the pressure of costs stemming not only from rent, wages and taxes, but also those associated with the rise in the price of raw materials given the significant decline in suppliers ( Wen, Wei, & Wang, 2020 ). Moreover, there have been important changes in consumption habits, with people attempting to avoid physical contact in order to prevent possible contagion, leading to a pressing need for a global transformation to take on this new environment ( Sheth, 2020 ). Responsive systems are required to facilitate the rapid adaptation of supply chains to accommodate changing consumer demands ( Sjodin et al., 2020 , Gordon et al., 2020 ).

There has been a rapid emergence of research in this area in an attempt to find alternative solutions and facilitate the transformation of companies aligned with the new scenario, thereby ensuring their survival under the best conditions. Pantano, Pizzi, Scarpi, and Dennis (2020) summarize the challenges faced by retailers, in order to provide guidelines that can enable them to deal with the disruptions caused by the pandemic in both the short and medium term. In this regard, marketing strategies play a key role ( Kirk and Rifkin, 2020 , Wang et al., 2020 ). The current situation should be taken as an opportunity for companies to put in place corporate social responsibility, consumer ethics and a marketing philosophy. This would open up more attractive strategies for organizations and consumers ( He and Harris, 2020 , Woodside, 2020 ). Other key aspects such as human resource management implications ( Leung, Sharma, Adithipyangkul, & Hosie, 2020 ) or gender equality ( Carnevale & Hatak, 2020 ) in pandemic situations have also been analysed recently.

The European countries that have been hardest hit by death due to COVID-19, such as, Italy (12,430 deaths at the beginning of April 1 ), Spain (8,189), France (3,523) or the United Kingdom (2,453), among others have seen how their tourism sector has experienced a total shutdown of activity with a major direct impact on the rest of the economy. Studies such as that carried out by Sigala (2020) highlight the effects of the pandemic on the sector, in line with the guidelines set out by Nepal (2020) , which call for this situation to be viewed as a reset opportunity and a chance to provide new sustainable services. Many more examples can be cited of studies in the literature where researchers have focused on COVID-19 and its consequences for companies ( Krishnamurthy, 2020 , Mullins, 2020 , Eggers, 2020 , Sharma et al., 2020 , Bacq et al., 2020 ).

The urgent need to find workable solutions for businesses brings the discipline of data mining to the fore. The ongoing development of research on this issue requires a global analysis of textual data in order to detect patterns from which conclusions can be drawn, and thus create the best possible conditions for orienting decision-making. For this reason, the main objective of this paper is to identify the most current research fields focused on the impact of COVID-19 on business. To that end, the text summarization technique of text mining was first applied, in order to identify the most frequently mentioned terms in business research papers that study COVID-19. Next, a text clustering method using the statistical software R Core Team (2020) was applied to identify groups of most frequent terms or research lines. The subject of the analysis was articles published in business journals indexed in the Web of Science (WoS) database. Specifically, 16 papers published in the Journal of Business Research and Business Horizons have been analysed.

Currently, many researchers are turning their full attention to COVID-19. Lopez, Vasu, and Gallemore (2020) use natural language processing, text mining and network analysis to explore the policies implemented to manage the COVID-19 analyzing information transmitted via Twitter. Cheng, Cao, and Liao (2020) demonstrate that information specialists can support health and medical community by applying text mining technique with latent Dirichlet allocation procedure to perform an overview of a mass of coronavirus literature. Similarly, Ulm and Nelson (2020) use text-mining and manual curation approach to comb and summarize the information from existing clinical trials and previous efforts to develop therapies against related betacoronaviruses. We emphasize that none of them performs a systematic literature review and employs a text clustering method using the statistical software R.

Therefore, it can highlight three novel contributions: (1) text-mining has been used in one of the areas most punished by the pandemic, the company, in order to be able to guide the guidelines that allow to solve the hard consequences caused by the confinement, (2) do a systematic review of business papers of high impact papers indexed in the first quartile of WoS so that the analysis of informative and sometimes sensationalist texts were avoided, (3) Free statistical software programming language R is proposed as a statistical tool.

The rest of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2 presents the database or corpus built from the selected papers, and explains the text summarization technique used to identify the most frequent terms followed by the text clustering method used to determine the groups of the most frequently mentioned terms. Section 3 outlines the main results of the research. Finally, Section 4 presents the most important conclusions of the study.

2. Data and methods

To carry out the empirical research, a selection must be made of recent studies in the literature that meet the analysis criteria. The new measures taken and their direct impact on the business world have brought to light the need for updated management policies to address the difficult economic situation, the first signs of which have not taken long to emerge. The journals for the database have been selected according to the following criteria:

Journals indexed in the WoS database. WoS is maintained by the Thomson Reuters Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) and contains more than 21,100 journals dating back to 1990, most of them written in English with a high impact factor ( Reuters, 2019 ).

Journals in the Business Management and Accounting area and Marketing category. These are two business fields that play a key role in ensuring companies’ survival. The development of management and marketing measures that facilitate companies' adaptation to the instability of the environment is essential in the process of overcoming the consequences of the pandemic.

Journals ranked in the top quartile (Q1).

Journals whose topic of interest is exclusively Business. Selecting these involved reading the titles, aims and scope.

These are generic criteria that have made it possible to narrow down the literature under study, so that the application of these filters yielded the following journals: Journal of Business Research, Journal of World Business, International Business Review and Business Horizons.

In order to select papers published in these journals whose topic of interest was coronavirus, a search was conducted for articles containing the words covid , coronavirus or pandemic in their abstract, title or keywords. Table 1 shows the business journals with the number of papers selected, ordered from highest to lowest impact factor (IF).

Business journals in the WoS database.

It can be seen that the Journal of Business Research has published the greater number of articles on COVID-related research (87.5% of all selected papers), followed by Business Horizons (12.5%). Journal of World Business and International Business Review have not published any research papers that deal with the COVID-19 pandemic, which highlights a focus of academic attention for business researchers.

Applying all the above search criteria has yielded a corpus consisting of 16 research papers published in two business journals which are indexed in the WoS database. Table 2 shows a summary of each individual article, providing the bibliographic citation, objective, keywords and most important conclusions.

Database: Selected Articles.

1 As this is an introductory article, it does not have any keywords.

Text analysis, also referred to as text mining, is an interdisciplinary field of activity that combines elements of data mining, linguistics, computational statistics, and computer science ( Meyer, Hornik, & Feinerer, 2008 ). The main difference between data mining and text mining is that data mining usually deals with structured data (stock information, geolocation data, etc.) while text mining works with unstructured or semi-structured data (articles, documents, etc.). In recent years, the latter technique has been a focus of interest because of the increasing amount of text data in social networks, web pages, research papers, and other information applications ( Aggarwal & Zhai, 2012 ). Its principal aim is to obtain high-quality information from processing large volumes of textual data. In this study, the summarization and clustering techniques of text mining were applied to a collection of previously processed papers, representing a collection of text documents in R. In this context, a document is a major element of text mining that constitutes a group of discrete textual data within a collection ( Acharya, 2018 ).

Given the technical requirements of the method used, the selected articles have to be filtered to avoid terms that could distort the results. Below, we show step-by-step the actions needed to prepare the text documents for analysis.

Step 1. Download the papers in pdf format and convert to txt format for processing.

Step 2. Manually analyse hyphenated words. If they are terms divided at the end of a line, remove the hyphen. If they are hyphenated words, leave the hyphen in.

Step 3. In order to focus the study on the main research topic of the papers analysed, manually remove the reference section and text citation of each one.

Step 4. Convert all terms to lowercase so there are no differences between the same terms.

Step 5. Remove punctuation marks.

Step 6. Delete digits .

Step 7. Remove stopwords which are commonly used in a language but that do not provide information in the text analysis. Some examples in English are that , then , the , a , an , and , among others.

Step 8. Stem the corpus to group related terms under their common root.

In line with the research objectives, after processing the database, a list of terms was obtained with the number of times each one appeared in the set of selected papers. The most frequent terms on the list were then analysed to identify the main research topics of interest in the corpus. Second, text clustering was applied to the most frequent terms detected. Clustering is a well-known statistical classification technique used in exploratory data analysis, which has been applied in a variety of scientific disciplines ( Täuscher and Laudien, 2018 , Han et al., 2019 , William and Chang, 2019 ). The main difference between hierarchical and non-hierarchical clustering methods is that the number of clusters is not predefined in the former. This study applied a hierarchical cluster analysis, where the number of groups was objectively determined. Specifically, the analysis was implemented using the statistical software R Core Team (2020) , applying Ward’s minimum variance method with Chi-squared distance. More details about the clustering process can be found in Husson, Lê, and Pagès (2017) .

The more terms two papers share, the more similar they are to each other ( Nguyen, 2013 ). The clustering process is based on maximizing the similarity between papers and, consequently, minimizing the Chi-squared distance between them. Chi-squared distance is a Euclidean distance but weighted by the inverse of the prevalence of each term in the whole corpus and controlling for the different lengths of the documents ( Bouchet-Valat & Bastin, 2018 ). Each resulting cluster has a certain within-cluster variance, such that the more similar the papers the lower the internal variance.

In order to choose the number of clusters objectively, four popular clustering validity indices were used in this study:

Average silhouette width . A measure that considers how closely related objects are within the cluster and how clusters are separated from each other. The average silhouette width provides clustering validity and is widely used to select the best number of clusters ( Rousseeuw, 1987 ). Its value ranges between 1 and −1, with a value of 1 indicating a very good cluster ( Yu-Wei, 2015 ). For more information about this index, see Kaufman and Rousseeuw (1990) .

Average between clusters . A measure of the average distance between cluster centres. It is influenced by the geometry of the cluster centres and increases with the number of clusters. The higher the value, the greater the separation between groups. A more formal and rigorous description of this statistic can be found in Halkidi, Batistakis, and Vazirgiannis (2001) .

Dunn index . High values of this metric indicate compact and well-separated clusters where the means of different groups are sufficiently far apart, taking into account the internal variance of cluster. For more detailed information, see Halkidi et al., 2002 , Dunn, 1974 .

Entropy Index . Measures the quantity of disorder (variation) is found in clusters. Low values of this index means better clustering. For more information, see Meilă (2007) .

3. Results and discussion

The functionalities of R have made it possible to create and examine the corpus formed by the 16 papers. To that end, we built a document term matrix of dimension nxt where n is the number of research papers (rows) and t the number of unique terms (columns). Each cell represents the absolute frequency of a term in a document.

Fig. 1 shows the output of the document term matrix. It can be seen that the corpus contains 4,743 different terms in the 16 business research papers. The non–/sparse entries are necessary to obtain the sparsity measure, which represents the frequency of the terms in the corpus. A high sparsity value means terms are not repeated often among the different documents ( Dinov, 2018 ) which implies that the documents that make up the corpus are not very similar. The longest terms, with 17 characters, are interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary.

Summary of document term matrix.

For the sake of brevity, Table 3 shows the 31 most frequent terms in the 16 papers. It should be noted that the name of each term indicates the root obtained in the stemming process (step 8). Terms that appear at least 135 times in the corpus were considered the most frequent; in the papers analysed, covid (571), crisi (407) and firm (400) were the most commonly mentioned terms.

Most frequent terms in the corpus.

Once the most frequent terms had been detected, a hierarchical cluster analysis was applied, in which the number of groups was determined objectively. Table 4 shows the result of validation statistics for the maximum number of clusters, 15. The best number of clusters will be the one with the highest value in the average silhouette width, average between and Dunn index measures, and the lowest in the entropy index. It can be seen that the best results are registered by 2 and 3 clusters. Although the results are very similar for both, we opted for 3 clusters to facilitate the interpretation of the groups.

Selection of the number of clusters.

Table 5 below shows the composition of each cluster into which similar papers have been grouped on the basis of the most frequent terms they share. The columns present the number of the cluster; the within-cluster variance; the Chi-squared distance to the cluster centroid, on the basis of which each paper is assigned to the closest cluster; document clustering; and finally, term clustering. Document clustering groups papers with the smallest Chi-squared distance to the average vocabulary of the cluster. Term clustering groups terms whose observed frequency in the document has a probability below 10% under a hypergeometric distribution, based on their overall frequencies in the corpus and on the number of occurrences of all terms in the considered cluster ( Bouchet-Valat & Bastin, 2018 ). The terms respons, provid , experi and custom are not shown because they are not significant (p-values ≥ 0.10) for clustering.

Summary of hierarchical cluster analysis of 16 research papers.

Clusters are comprised of similar papers with common terms. Fig. 2 represents the 3 obtained clusters with the terms that make up each one on a two-dimensional plane. Each term is represented by a point, with the distance to the closest one indicating the similarity between them ( Lancia, 2008 ). The distance between terms and the origin (0,0) measures the quality of the terms on the two-dimensional plane. The terms that lie farther from the origin will be more discriminatory and well represented on map cluster ( Kassambara, 2017 ). The clustering of these terms highlights the most pressing concern surrounding the pandemic, revealing patterns that could guide companies in implementing measures to mitigate the consequences of the pandemic.

Hierarchical clustering of most frequent terms in the corpus.

3.1. Cluster 1: Impact on the public health management model

The first cluster consists of a single research paper; that is, 6.25% of the papers analysed. It differs from the other documents in the sample in that it approaches COVID-19 as a scenario for studying gender equity in public systems, specifically in health organizations. The key terms that make up this cluster are health , public , develop , effect and impact . The terms health and public have a high frequency in this cluster relative to the total for the corpus. This indicates that they are the most discriminant terms of the cluster; as such, they lie far from the origin in Fig. 2 . Develop , impact and effect have a lower frequency, but are closer to one other, reflecting the high similarity between them. It should be noted that the term gender does not appear in this cluster because its frequency relative to the total for the corpus is very low.

Leung et al. (2020) show that gender equity and development have a positive impact on women's representation in the legislature and are consequently positively correlated with public health spending. Furthermore, this expenditure significantly influences the volume of diagnosed cases and the treatment of critical cases, with the urban population having a positive influence on the number of tests and COVID-related deaths. All of this underscores the importance of continuing the struggle for gender equality and of women holding decision-making positions. In extreme situations such as those experienced during the pandemic, there is a need to combine the characteristic features of both genders, toning down the riskier positions more typical of the male gender ( Ertac & Gurdal, 2012 ).

This pandemic has meant the quality of public health systems being called into question in all affected countries. The emerging new scenario is encouraging a shift from public policymakers towards fostering women's access to leadership positions, which has been shown to be a positive factor in ensuring the quality of public services provided ( WHO, 2017 , Mayer and Oosthuizen, 2020 ). Efforts must be made to ensure the excellence of the management of health systems, with clear policies and priorities set to benefit the population. In addition, it is necessary to ensure correspondence between the effects of the coronavirus pandemic and national development, where access to public health should be a universal right.

3.2. Cluster 2: Changes in society's consumption habits

This cluster includes 18.7% of the articles analysed, and the key theme centres around consumption , technology , pandemic , time , social , new , change and research . The terms consumption and technology have a high frequency in the cluster relative to the total for the corpus, and it is these terms are the most discriminating in the cluster. There is a strong connection between the terms research , change , pandemic , social , new and time which highlights the usefulness of focusing studies on the social changes arising from the new situation that emerged during the pandemic ( Fig. 2 ).

The research carried out and grouped in this cluster has placed great importance on the rapid spread of the disease and the new societal habits established in response. In just under five months this infectious disease has affected all the countries of the world, forcing all the agents in the economy to adapt. Nevertheless, countries' reactions to the uncontrolled spread of the virus have not been homogeneous. The vast majority have opted for public lockdowns, imposing strong restrictions on the national and international mobility of people and products. Social distancing rules are forcing companies to adapt their distribution channels in order to reach consumers, who have had to adapt very quickly to this new scenario.

All this has led to a reorientation of research, with analyses focused on trying to explain the unusual needs emerging in the markets. The “new normal” requires changes that are revolutionizing previous customs and life as we knew it before the pandemic ( Kirk & Rifkin, 2020 ). The use of emerging technologies is now an imperative; society is incorporating them into daily life at a dizzying pace, prompting new patterns of behaviour, which in turn are having a major impact on consumption habits. This calls for a realignment of business strategies to adapt to this new globalized market. It is thus essential to establish good management practices to bring supply in line with consumer demand ( Pantano et al., 2020 ).

3.3. Cluster 3: Economic effects of covid-19 on business organizations

Of all the papers that make up the corpus, 75.05% analyse the economic effects of coronavirus from different perspectives, but the common thread running through them is the economic and social implications for production networks as a result of the measures taken to curb the contagion. In this respect, the most commonly used terms were firm , tourism , business , crisis , strategies , financial , organization , market , innovation , supply , management , global , covid and work , with firm, tourism and, financial being the most significant. The proximity of all these terms indicates the strong correlation between them ( Fig. 2 ).

Globalization and the interconnectedness of countries has been the main trigger for the worldwide spread of COVID-19. The closure of national borders and the restricted mobility of the population even within their own territory has resulted in economic disruption comparable only to the Great Recession. The resulting global crisis is expected to be unprecedented; the paralysis of the entire productive sector has led to a supply and demand shock, with the consequent collapse of international financial markets. All economic sectors have been affected, with the impact being especially intense in countries that are heavily dependent on tourism.

Faced with this new situation, there are only two real alternatives: to try to get back to the normality we knew before the pandemic, in order to avoid the social impact of high levels of unemployment; or to consider this new scenario as a turning point, marking the start of new ways of working. International bodies and authorities responsible for setting national policy should focus their efforts on helping companies to introduce technological and social innovation to enable them to recover and remain competitive. Without exception, the pandemic has rendered countries' productive systems obsolete. New, more interconnected forms of management are needed, but with less dependence on external agents, which is where virtual markets are irreversibly gaining ground.

4. Conclusions

Affecting all countries around the world, COVID-19 has caused the most severe pandemic of recent times, the economic consequences of which have not taken long to emerge. Business survival will depend on the ability to adapt to the new market, which has been shaped by the restrictions on movement imposed by almost all nations to curb the spread of the disease. Small and medium-sized businesses have been the hardest hit by the pandemic, so they will have to reinvent themselves quickly if they want to survive in this unforeseen scenario. In this new reality, the future of business is uncertain, so making the right decisions is crucial to strengthening companies.

There has been a rush of new research papers on the disease and its economic and social effects, so it is necessary to identify some kind of similarities among them in order to be able to draw conclusions that can be used to orient guidelines for business. This paper proposes the use of text mining methodology to detect lines of research centred around the coronavirus, and the results can be used to mark out policies to be implemented. We analysed a set of papers representative of the area of business and marketing, published in journals indexed in the top quartile of the prestigious database, WoS.

In light of the results obtained, three different areas of intervention can be identified. The common thread that runs through all of them is the need to introduce new forms of action to improve citizens' quality of life. The “nascent” market resulting from the lockdown situation requires profound changes in the management systems of the entire productive network, with public health playing a key role. The standard that existed until now has become obsolete. There is thus a need to adapt to the novel features of consumer habits, where virtual business systems have gained ground they are unlikely to cede. Remote working has become universal due to the pandemic, with many companies adopting it on a long-term or even permanent basis. The survival of businesses will depend on their ability to treat this situation as a turning point; detailed market analysis and the introduction of innovation at all levels will strengthen the foundations of productive activity. Authorities must facilitate and assist in this arduous task—one for which not everyone is prepared—without neglecting issues such as gender equality and human rights. This is an opportunity for renewal that must be seized in order to promote the sustainability of organizations, regardless of their profit-making purpose. As is well known, the pandemic has caused the largest drop in CO2 emissions in history. Therefore, the time is right to introduce management models that address climate change, which is becoming an international urgency at all levels.

The whole world is experiencing an unprecedented situation that requires additional analysis and efforts in all economic sectors. The researches of the last few months is aimed at providing solutions to problems that have not ceased to arise, and which will continue until the pandemic is brought under control so as to avoid affecting the economy. It is essential to implement a joint effort between researchers and those responsible for economic and business guidelines with the aim of combining contributions that will allow them to move into the professional field to optimise the solutions found.

The main limitation of this research is the volume of the corpus. Specifically, 16 works published at the time of the empirical analysis have been analyzed, which met the criteria defined in the Section 2 . Therefore, the natural extension of this paper is to expand the database in order to be able to establish more specific measures, tailored to each scenario and country. Once the new database has been processed using the programming language provided in R, the methodology presented in this article could easily be replicated.

Biographies

Patricia Carracedo is graduated in Actuarial and Financial Sciences (2007) and Business Studies (2004) at the Universitat de València and has a Master's Degree in data analysis engineering (2013) at the Universitat Politècnica of València (UPV). PhD in Statistics and Operational Research at UPV. She is Director of two degrees in Business Administration and Management and Economics at the Valencian International University and since 2014, lecturer of Statistics and Econometrics in both degrees. She was awarded at the congress “XXV ASEPUMA Conference - XIII International Meeting 2017” and obtained a research project of the Fundación Mapfre as main researcher. Her research has been developed using the statistical package R-studio, getting to have a good command of it.

Rosa Puertas. PhD in Economics and Business. Professor at the Universitat Politècnica de València, Department of Economics and Social Sciences. She has carried out research related to various fields: International Trade, Efficiency, Input-Output and Logistics. Currently, she has focused on issues related to innovation, sustainability and construction of synthetic indexes, which are leading to publications in internationally prestigious journals. Member of Group of International Economics and Development.

Luisa Marti is PhD in Economics and Business Studies from the University of Valencia (2001). For the last 20 years I have been a professor at the Polytechnic University of Valencia, where I have taught subjects related to the field of applied economics. Since 2019 I have been a university lecturer. My main areas of research are trade, economic impact analysis, quantitative data analysis in companies, and efficiency analysis. Having a six-year research and numerous publications in prestigious journals of impact Journal Citation Report.

Data published by European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control.

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Management research and the impact of COVID-19 on performance: a bibliometric review and suggestions for future research

• Kingsley Opoku Appiah 1 ,
• Bismark Addai 2 ,
• Wesley Ekuban 3 ,
• Suzzie Owiredua Aidoo 4 &
• Joseph Amankwah-Amoah 5  

Future Business Journal volume  8 , Article number:  41 ( 2022 ) Cite this article

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Although there has been a burgeoning scholarly interest in the effects of COVID-19, the current stream of research remains scattered in different business and management fields and domains. Accordingly, integrative knowledge is needed to drive poignant and relevant examinations of the phenomenon. This study attempts to fill this gap by providing a synthesis of the literature, patterns of research studies, and direction for further development of the field. This study also provides a systematic identification and bibliometric and thematic review of literature, performance analysis, science mapping, and cluster analysis. The study additionally provides suggestions for future research to guide relevant discourse.

Introduction

The term pandemic has been used to describe the widespread outbreak of disease through human-to-human infections [ 1 ]. Medical texts providing a clear definition of what constitutes a pandemic are non-existent. However, its geographic extent and infectiousness and severe negative impact on all aspects of society are clearly understood [ 2 ]. To this end, research has continued to understand the extent to which pandemics shape communities, economies and society as a whole [ 3 , 4 ]. The COVID-19 pandemic is no exception, with its catastrophic effects considered to be one of the worst in human history [ 5 ]. It is no surprise the plethora of studies seeking to understand the phenomena. The severity of the pandemic has paved the way for a rapidly escalating body of empirical literature analyzing the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic on countries [ 6 , 7 ], firms [ 8 ], and households [ 9 , 10 ]. Some business and finance-related studies, for example, have focused on macro-economic indicators [ 11 ], policy alternatives and implementation [ 12 , 13 ], business responses and implications [ 4 , 14 ] as well as firm performance outcomes and failures [ 15 , 16 ].

The COVID-19 pandemic like all other global crises impacts on all aspects of life including business activities. Shocks caused by such events disrupt business operations across the globe and in extreme situations lead to business failure [ 17 , 18 ]. The influence of business activity on national and global economies has encouraged an increasing scholarly interest in understanding the extent to which firm performance has been impacted. Developing suitable and sustainable policy and strategy responses is the logical action and focus of all governments and scholars to help mitigate the negative effects of this pandemic. However, to develop such effective strategies, the extent and various ways in which firm activities and performance has been affected must first be examined. To this end, scholars have found that the COVID-19 pandemic has severely impacted the performance of the hospitality industry [ 19 ], supply chains [ 20 ], stocks of listed companies [ 21 , 22 ], SMEs and family firms [ 23 , 24 ].

Notwithstanding the vital contributions of these studies, the integral role of research is to detect and synthesize patterns, conditions and effects in business activity, to help ensure effective decision-making and policy development. Carracedo et al. [ 25 ] began this pattern detection by conducting a systematic literature review of relevant literature. Although, Carracedo et al.’s [ 25 ] study offers novel insights into the clusters of COVID-19 business-related studies, it hardly provides in-depth knowledge and practicable knowledge on the scope, relationships and gaps in literature. To this end, the present study advances knowledge by conducting a systematic literature review and bibliometric analysis of the relationship between COVID-19 and firm performance.

The contribution to the literature is threefold. First, based on the review a comprehensive baseline systematization on the impact of COVID -19 on firm performance was advanced to enhance the understanding of the impact of the pandemic on firm performance. In so doing, we also provide fruitful lines for future research and/or policy (see [ 26 ]). Second, synthesizing the rapidly evolving literature into a conceptual framework/clusters, the study provides academicians, industrial players, government agencies, and all other stakeholders a comprehensive overview and access to the central topics, trends and the implications of the research on the impact of the pandemic on firm performance. Furthermore, the review of the data provides an opportunity to offer a deeper insight to help control the impact of the pandemic on firm’s performance and the antecedent effects on households and economies.

The rest of the paper proceeds as follows. “ Method and initial statistics ” section discusses the method. “ Bibliometric analysis ” and “ Thematic/cluster analysis ” sections present an in-depth bibliometric and cluster/thematic analyses of the dataset, respectively. “ Directions for future research ” and “ Conclusion and limitations ” sections provide direction for future research and the conclusion, respectively.

Method and initial statistics

The objective of this study is to construct a scientific map and further analyze the worth of knowledge produced by management experts who examine the impact of COVID-19 on firms’ performance. Following relevant literature (e.g., [ 27 , 28 ]) and best practices in the mapping of scientific knowledge, we conduct a bibliometrix analysis and a systematic review of the relevant literature. Specifically, we use the bibliometrix to construct scientific mapping to highlight the knowledge base, and its intellectual structure as well as both the conceptual and social network structures of Covid 19’s impact on performance extant literature (see [ 29 , 30 ]). By combining the two complementary approaches, we are able to paint a picture of the development of scientific knowledge on the impact of COVID-19 on firm performance using quantitative bibliometrix tools and also provide a comprehensive analysis of the themes/topics and contents by means of qualitative systematic review. These approaches are well established in management literature (see [ 27 , 31 ]).

Data collection

To undertake this systematic and bibliometric analysis, articles discussing the influence of COVID-19 on firm performance were retrieved and analyzed. To ensure and maintain an unbiased and high-quality database and review, strict criteria were adhered to. These are described in the following steps:

Step 1 A literature search was conducted in Scopus Database. The aim is to ensure broader access to ranked management related, reputable and quality journals.

Step 2 The search was conducted with the search term: ("COVID-19" or "CoronaVirus") and ("value" or "performance" or “profitability”). Various search strings using multiple combinations of the search terms were used during the data collection process. These include ((covid-19 OR coronavirus) AND (value OR performance OR profitability)).

Step 3 The search focused on scholarly studies relating to the impact of COVID 19 on firms published from 2019 to 24 July, 2021. We consider papers published from 2019 to 2021 because COVID-19 emerged as a global health crisis in 2019 [ 9 ] and we finished our literature search in July 2021.

Step 4 These studies were limited to final articles published within Business & Management & Accounting, Social Science, Economics, Econometrics & Finance Journals. We omit books, Ph.D. Thesis, working papers, technical reports, conference proceedings. The stages and the tasks undertaken during the literature search are summarized in Table 1 .

An initial search produced 19,645 articles, excluding articles outside of the 2019–2021 range yielded 18,710. Of these 1571 were management and accounting related. Subsequently, review papers (70), conference papers (59), editorial (10), book chapters (14), note (27), book (7) and letters (4) leaving 1372 articles. Finally, 1355 English journal articles were retained for the bibliometric and thematic analyses. Subsequent steps in this study consisted of conducting a bibliometric and a thematic analysis of articles retained. The bibliometric analysis consists of a performance analysis of articles, authors and journals to identify relevant literature in the field. Next a scientific mapping of country production as well as a keyword analysis is conducted to highlight on the various research topics in the field. We use Biblioshiny and VOSViewer Software applications to perform the bibliometric analysis. Finally, the study conducts a detailed thematic analysis, by identifying and synthesizing studies within the four main research clusters.

Descriptive statistics

Table 2 captures the description of the data collected for the bibliometric analysis and the SLR. As illustrated in the table, we identify 1355 scholarly articles, spread across 437 sources, with 73,478 references, 4407 authors keywords, 3538 authors, 0.383 article per author, and 2.85 co-authors per article. Our descriptive also shows 253 single authorships, while collaboration index is 3.03 (see Table 2 ). Our analysis shows the impact of Covid 19 on performance was first mentioned in the Management research literature in 2019 by Sterling and Merluzzi’s (2019) paper, highlighting that tryouts may rise due to Covid 19-related impacts on US Firms. Table 2 reports an astronomical rate of 31.7% for the 2-year period from 2020 to 2021, implying the ever-increasing literature on the impact of Covid 19 on performance.

The study examines the scientometric index measuring a journal’s impact by assessing the average number of article citations over the last two years. Table 3 shows the top ten most impactful journals in terms of the number of publications on impact of Covid-19 on performance research. It should be noted that the top ten journals published 215 out of 1355 articles, accounting for 15.9% of articles in our dataset. The results indicate that majority of these journals ranked three or two in Association of Business School Journal quality list. Overall, these multi-disciplinary outlets suggest the topic is attractive to all management scholars and research areas.

Bibliometric analysis

The study’s bibliometric analysis reveals the valuable insights to knowledge within management research in assessing the influences of COVID on business performance.

Author influence

This section discusses the most impactful authors to the research domain. Table 4 displays the most impactful author on the basis of h-index, m-index, g-index and number of publications. We examine author’s impact by analyzing the number of academic benchmark performance indicators, namely citations, H-index, G-index, and M-index [ 32 , 33 , 34 ]. The H-index, viewed as an unbiased overview, for example, combines the number of papers and citations to assess author’s scientific contributions over time [ 35 ]. The H-index, however, overlooks the impactful but discriminatory author, implying it favors high-volume authors. Accordingly, we complement the H-index analysis with the G-index. G-index measures the highest rank such that the top G papers have, together, at least G 2 citations (see [ 35 ] for details).

Overall, the small number of publications from these prolific authors confirms the infancy stage of the research domain, thereby allowing different authors with diverse expertise in management research to contribute to the discourse on the impact of Covid-19 and performance from 2019 to present. The results indicate that Dmitry Ivanov is the most influential author with an H-index of 5 and a G-index of 6. All 6 articles authored or co-authored by him have received a total of 448 citations. This is followed by Vanessa Ratten with H and G-indexes of 5 and 6, respectively. She has authored and co-authored a total of 8 articles in the field, earning a total citation score of 64. Next, Andres Coca-Stefaniak, Sertan Kabadayi and Jungkeun Kim assume the third, fourth and fifth most impactful author, respectively, each with an H and G-index of 3. Generally, the H and G-indexes produce different rankings, the results show that the ranking remains the same except for the highest and second highest ranked authors, who interchange according to the index understudy.

Again, critics argue that both H-index and G-index ignore different career lengths [ 36 ]. Accordingly, we use the M-index (i.e., M-quotient), which is H-index divided by author’s active literary years to help provide a clearer view of author rankings in the research area. Ranking scholars according to the M-quotient, sees Junkeun Kim as the highest ranked author with an M-quotient/index of 3, Dmitry Ivanov and Vanessa Ratten are the second and third highest ranked authors. Other impactful authors, who have contributed immensely to the field and are ranked among the top 10 impactful scholars are summarized in Table 4 .

Geographical and institutional scientific production

Biblioshiny was used to retrieve the author organization/affiliation and address information, after which all the authors were sorted in descending order. Table 5 displays the top 20 organizations publishing the most articles on Covid 19 and performance. University of Johannesburg in South Africa contributes most with 17 articles on Covid 19 and performance, followed by The Hong Kong Polytechnic University in Hong Kong . Table 4 shows that RATTEN V from the La Trobe University contributes most with 9 articles, and the affiliation appears as the Top 6 contributing organization. Surprisingly, most of the other influential authors do not have their organizations listed in Table 5 . For example, Ivanov D, Gupta S, Kim J, Kumar A, Li S, Li Z, Sharma A, Zhang J, emerge as the Top 2 to 5 contributing authors, respectively; however, their organizations do not appear in influential organizations in Table 5 . Likewise, the University of Johannesburg emerges as the Top 1 contributing institution with 17 publications but no author from this university is listed in Table 4 . Similar surprises exist at other universities such as the RMIT university , the University of Auckland and the Auckland University of Technology which appear in Table 5 but no author from those organizations appears in Table 4 . The results imply that the contributing authors have come diverse research backgrounds in different methodological and industrial settings. For instance, the 17 publications from the University of Johannesburg cover various industries such as fruit, food, manufacturing and food, and they employ differing methodologies including empirical analysis and case studies.

Being a global health issue that has induced economic and social upheaval worldwide, COVID-19 and its related performance impact has received global scholarly attention. The geographic distribution of research attention is shown in Fig.  1 . The United States of America has the highest concentration of COVID-19 and performance impact studies of 377 (22.93%) articles. The literature on performance impact of COVID-19 has received much attention in the United States because the country has encountered disproportionately elevated levels of economic fallout, infections and deaths [ 6 , 37 ]. For instance, WHO reports that compared to other countries, the USA has the highest infection and death rates of 99,085,620, and 2,377,656, respectively. The United Kingdom emerges as the second country with concentration of studies on the performance impact of COVID-19 contributing 286 (17.40%) of the articles. China, Australia and India contribute the third (11.50%), fourth (10.95%) and fifth (10.10%) positions, respectively. Also, the impact of Covid-19 is evaluated in the Indonesia, Italy, New Zealand, Spain and Portugal by other 446 empirical research articles, representing 27.14% of the top 10 geographic dispersion. Generally, the geographical distribution in Fig.  1 depicts that countries in North America (USA), Oceania, Europe and Asia have the highest interest in studies on the performance impact of COVID-19 as compared to those in South America, Africa and Antarctica (where the interest in the study area is scanty). However, literature shows the highly interrelated nature of the global economy today [ 38 ]. Besides, the multinational nature of business activities today, heightens the need to expand knowledge on performance impacts across all continents. Thus, more empirical analysis on the impact of Covid-19 on performance is needed in those regions seemingly underrepresented in scholarship but pivotal to global business and supply chain [ 39 , 40 ].

Geographic dispersion of publications on Covid-19 and performance

Keyword analysis

Next, we conduct a keyword analysis to identify popular research perspectives in the area. Table 6 contains the biblioshiny’s keyword analysis results of 4407 author keywords in the 1355 articles reviewed in the study. As expected, COVID-19 and several iterations of the virus, crisis, crisis management and resilience make up the top 8 keywords. “ Tourism” takes 9th place on the list, indicating the relevance of tourism to national and global economies and elucidating the extent to which the pandemic has influenced the valuable global industry [ 41 ]. Innovation and resilience have been frequently discussed in conjunction with COVID-19 and business research, highlighting inherent relations between innovation and resilience in the COVID-19-performance nexus [ 42 , 43 ]. Again, Finsterwalder and Kuppelwieser [ 44 ] and Golan et al. [ 39 ] highlight the need for resilience and for developing appropriate strategy for recovery following a disruptive event. “Crisis Management” and “Leadership” are similarly popular research foci owing to the significant roles crisis management and leadership play in mitigating crisis and lessening its adverse effects [ 45 , 46 ]. Other frequently used keywords include performance, entrepreneurship, stock market, and supply chain as they all relate to business management and the performance implications of the pandemic. Country-related keywords include India and China, which have both been epicenters of the pandemic at one point or another [ 47 ]. Lastly, Table 6 shows gender as a frequently used keyword as a result of the recorded differences in infection and fatality rate among men and women [ 48 ] as well as employment, equality and other sociological equality implications [ 49 ].

To further identify themes investigated in the management research and the impact of COVID -19 and Performance, given that the field is at its infancy, we used co-occurrence of keywords analysis based on keywords that occurred at least five times, resulting in 133 satisfying the threshold out of 4407 authors keywords. Figure  2 displays the network visualization diagram of VOSviewer highlighting seven common keywords, namely, COVID-19, pandemic, coronavirus, resilience, crisis, COVID-19 pandemic and crisis management. The size of nodes and thickness of line displayed in Fig.  2 verify these findings (see [ 50 ], p. 552 for further reading). The homogeneous nature of these keywords confirms the collective focus on business performance and economic impacts of the pandemic. Figure  2 also displays 7 clustered keywords for 132.

Network visualization diagram of authors keyword on Covid-19 and performance

Citation analysis

In analyzing the 1355 articles, the study examined the citation measure of each article. Citation analysis is usually measured using two indexes: the global and local citations, whereas the former represents the citation of a given article by other articles within the entire academic database of articles, the latter indicates the citation score of a given article by other articles within the articles being assessed in this study [ 29 ].

Table 7 reports the top 10 cited articles, based on both local and global citation scores. The table shows that the most impactful article is “Predicting the impacts of epidemic outbreaks on global supply chains: a simulation-based analysis of the COVID-19/SARS-CoV2 case" —[ 51 ] . Ivanov [ 51 ] examines the global supply chain impacts of pandemic outbreak through simulation-based analysis, which was published in Transportation Research Part E: Logistics and Transportation Review. The study focuses on crucial management and performance issues affected during crisis such as risk management and resilience and thus sets the tone for the later empirical studies. The second most cited article is “ Risk perceptions of COVID-19 around the world ”—[ 52 ]. This article mapped and modeled the risk perception of COVID-19 around 10 countries (US, UK, Australia, Germany, Spain, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Mexico, and Sweden). It highlights the role strong predictive roles of various experiential, and socio-cultural values and factors. The next highest cited article is “ Tourism and COVID-19: Impacts and implications for advancing and resetting industry and research ”—[ 53 ]. The study critically evaluates tourism transformation and impacts of the pandemic through a literature review and sets the tone for resetting and advancing research frontiers.

Other impactful articles include “ Feverish stock price reactions to COVID-19 ”—[ 21 ], which provides evidence of the impacts of COVID-19 on stock returns across US industries. The next is “ Effects of COVID-19 on hotel marketing and management: a perspective article ”—[ 54 ] which discusses the effect of COVID-19 on hotel marketing and management by outlining relevant research agenda to foster knowledge development. The multidisciplinary nature of COVID-19 research is evidenced in the diverse perspective from which these studies have examined the effect of the pandemic. Table 2 summarizes the top 10 most impactful studies.

The top 10 cited articles on COVID-19 and performance are presented in Table 8 . The table indicates that the two most cited authors are Ivanov D and Wen J. who appear as the Top 2 and Top 18, respectively, in the authors with most publication list in Table 4 . Most of the other authors in the most cited author list also appear in the most productive author list and these results signify that most of the authors in the two lists are not only productive but they are also very influential.

Co-citation analysis

We analyze the 1355 articles in our dataset, with a minimum threshold of 3 citations; the obtained set contains 29 cited references out of the 6724 total references as reported by VOSviewer. The five most connected references (Fig.  3 ) are: Fornell, C. and Larcker, D.F., 1981. Evaluating structural equation models with unobservable variables and measurement error.  Journal of marketing research ,  18 (1), pp. 39–50. Henseler, J., Ringle, C.M. and Sarstedt, M., 2015. A new criterion for assessing discriminant validity in variance-based structural equation modeling.  Journal of the academy of marketing science ,  43 (1), pp. 115–135. Podsakoff, P.M., MacKenzie, S.B., Lee, J.Y. and Podsakoff, N.P., 2003. Common method biases in behavioral research: a critical review of the literature and recommended remedies.  Journal of applied psychology ,  88 (5), p. 879. Sheth, J., 2020. Business of business is more than business: Managing during the Covid crisis.  Industrial Marketing Management ,  88 , pp. 261–264. Teece, D.J., Pisano, G. and Shuen, A., 1997. Dynamic capabilities and strategic management.  Strategic management journal ,  18 (7), pp. 509–533.

Network visualization of the largest connected sets of cited references

Figure  3 displays the network visualization of the largest connected sets of cited references. The papers with the highest coupling strengths are those by Henseler, J., Ringle, C.M. and Sarstedt, M., 2015 and Podsakoff, P.M., MacKenzie, S.B., Lee, J.Y. and Podsakoff, N.P., 2003. These papers are central because of their specific contribution to methodological issues in business management and accounting research. Henseler et al. [ 55 ] provide guidelines on how to handle discriminant validity issues in variance-based structural equation modeling, while Podsakoff et al. [ 56 ] provide recommendations for how to select appropriate procedural and statistical remedies for different types of research settings.

Out of the 2354 cited sources, 17 journal each received more than 20 citations. The top 5 journals with the highest numbers of citations are: Tourism Management (98), International Journal of Hospitality Management (66), Journal of Business Research (50), Annual of Research (38), and Journal of Travel Research (32) (Fig.  4 ). These numbers make it evident how much of the discussion of the impact of Covid-19 on performance is supported by papers published in Tourism Management. The analysis of the network visualization provides interesting considerations. It suggests the existence of four different clusters, regarding the managerial implications related to tourism, finance, marketing and hospitality management. The specific clusters on tourism and hospitality management is inevitable due to the impact of Covid-19 on this industry.

Network visualization of the largest connected sets of cited sources by journal

Out of the 9338 cited authors, only 52 had been cited more than 10 times, while only 9 authors were cited more than 20 times. The authors are: Hall C.M (38), Boccia, F (31), Narayan, P.K (31), Salisu, A.A (28), Glossling, S (25), Zhang y (25), Liu Y (22) and Sarstedt, M (20) from University of Canterbury, Parthenope University of Naples, Deakin University, University of Ibadan, Lund University, Harbin Institute of Technology, University of Illinois, Otto-von-Guericke University, respectively. Figure  5 shows network visualization of the author co-citation analysis. It also highlights that these authors are most connected as well as most cited. The network visualization displays the existence of five different clusters. The red, green, and blue clusters are characterized by a high degree of bibliographic coupling with 15–16 items each, while two clusters show 2 items each. The red, green, blue, yellow and violet clusters with the highest degree of bibliographic coupling contain Hall et al. [ 57 ], Zhang et al. [ 58 ], and Narayan et al. [ 59 ], respectively. These studies provide insights on the impacts of Covid-19 on the services sector and consumption displacement (Hall et al. 57 ), global financial markets (Zhang et al. 58 ) and economic stimulus (Narayan et al. 59 ) (Fig.  5 ).

Network visualization of the largest connected sets of cited sources by authors

Network visualization of the bibliographic coupling of articles

Bibliographic coupling

We use bibliographic coupling of the 1349 articles to understand the theoretical foundations of publications on Covid-19 and performance. The minimum number of two articles was analyzed, resulting in the most extensive set of connected documents of 418 publications (30.98% of the dataset). Figure  6 shows network visualization of the bibliographic coupling analysis by articles, highlighting two clusters with the largest set of connected articles of 8 publications (0.59% of the dataset) implying the absence of a consolidated Covid-19 on performance field of study. The red cluster is characterized by a high degree of bibliographic coupling with 5 publications (i.e., [ 60 , 61 , 62 , 63 ]) (Tavares et al. 64 ), while green cluster shows 3 publications (i.e., Asian et al. 65 ; Kells 66 ; Tavares et al. 67 ).

Network visualization of the bibliographic coupling of journals

To analyze the bibliographic coupling of journals, we set a minimum of two articles per journal (see [ 28 ]) (Ferreira 68 ), resulting in 226 (50.78% of the dataset) out of 445 journals (see Fig. 7 ). Figure  7 shows network visualization of the bibliographic coupling analysis by journals, highlighting seven clusters with the largest set of connected journals of 74, implying the absence of a consolidated Covid-19 on performance field of study. Figure  7 reveals that the five journals with the highest bibliographic coupling index are Research in International Business, Financial Innovation, Technological Forecasting and Social Change, Tourism Management, and Journal of Business Research. Figure  7 reveals the central role played by other journal in the various clusters including red (International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management and Journal of Public Budgeting, Accounting and Financial Management), violet (International Journal of Entrepreneurship Behavior and research), yellow (Corporate Governance-Bingley), green (Journal of Theoretical and Applied Electronic Research) and blue (International Journal of Emerging Markets). These show the field of the research on the impact of Covid 19 on financial and non-financial indicators is receiving attention from multi-disciplinary scholars of business management and accounting.

Cluster analysis of articles

Thematic/cluster analysis

Next, to provide a deeper synthesis and identify relevant patterns in performance-related COVID-19 research, the study conducts a thematic analysis as advocated by [ 69 ]. The study begins by conducting a cluster analysis of the reviewed studies and subsequently discusses the themes of these clusters in detail. The study conducts a cluster analysis of articles to identify relevant ideas, couplings or themes shaping research in COVID-19 influence on performance research. Using a co-citation cluster analysis with Biblioshiny in R, the study identifies three main clusters of research. These are illustrated in Fig.  8 .

Although identifying the main clusters of research in this domain is important, a deeper analysis of the identified themes or clusters will offer more critical insights to knowledge while guiding direction for future research. Thus, we discuss landmark publications within each thematic cluster and synthesize their key contributions to COVID-19 and performance literature. These publications are divided into three clusters contributing to different thematic areas within COVID-19 and performance literature, as identified in Fig.  3 . The landmark publications highlighted within the first cluster assess the COVID-19 pandemic situation from various foundational perspectives. Cluster two contains articles focused on the broad concepts of crisis management and strategic management. Cluster three includes landmark publications which capture the performance outcomes and strategies of COVID-19 on various businesses including sports, education, and global supply chain.

Cluster 1: foundational discussions and risk assessment

Cluster 1 is made up of several papers that assess the COVID-19 pandemic since its inception from various perspectives. These studies elaborate on the nature and implication of the pandemic on macro-economic management [ 70 ] hospitality and human rights to movement [ 71 ] as well as service ecosystems [ 44 , 72 ]. Studies in this cluster provide an elaborate assessment of the COVID-19 pandemic, as a crisis with catastrophic implications while highlighting the shortcomings of current crisis management strategies worldwide on a business and macro-economic level.

First, we consider the seminal paper [ 71 ] which attempts to assess the impact of COVID-19 on human rights to participate in hospitality and tourism, as a result of imposed travel restrictions. The study assesses the extent to which government responses to the pandemic influenced individual right to travel for leisure, business, education among others. These were evident in the closing of tourist sites, national borders, recalling of citizens to their primary residence as well as national restrictions on movement, thus confining people to their homes with little mobility to almost all service provision locations except those considered essential. In certain instances, these restrictions resulted in the inability of some tourists to return to their home countries as was experienced on several cruise ships in Europe, the Americas and Asia. These restrictions additionally, resulted in the loss of employment of numerous individuals. However, the study shows that although the pandemic and its resultant restrictions have imposed numerous challenges to tourism, individual, business and national economic growth, the closure of national borders has seen a reduction in human trafficking, child sex tourism as well as the reduction in environmental pollution and degradation through fossil fuel consumption among others. Lastly, speculating that the global hospitality and tourism industry will face a precarious future riddled with mass closures of small hospitality businesses, increasing operating and consumer costs, the study urges that scholars continue to seek answers to important questions overtime on reinstating hospitality and tourism in a post-COVID-19 world.

Following the broad picture by Baum and Hai [ 71 ], Kabadayi et al. [ 72 ] synthesized the macro-economic impact of COVID-19 while offering a framework for recognizing impacts of disruptions on service ecosystems. The study proposes the concept of service mega-disruptions (SMDs) to refer to the simultaneous multi-industry service disruptions caused by a pandemic. Defining the concept as an event caused by an unforeseen pandemic which affects multiple stakeholders and service ecosystems simultaneously and remains difficult to swiftly recover from, the study introduces a multi-level framework which may better arm service researchers and practitioners alike for future similar disruptions. The study uncovers five research themes relevant in the reducing the impact of service mega-disruptions. These include service ecosystem recovery, service agility and transformation, service technology and automation, remote service provision and finally service theory of social distancing. The study provides these holistic themes which encompass the micro- (individual and employee), meso- (service industries and public services) and macro-level (government actions and policies) perspectives of recovery measures.

Next, Finsterwalder and Kuppelwieser [ 44 ] explore the impact of crises such as COVID-19, on the service industry and its research community. By identifying and categorizing the micro-, meso- and macro-levels of service ecosystems, the study introduces a novel resource-challenges equilibrium (RCE) framework for pre-incident, incident, and post-incident phase strategies directed at building resource resilience. The study highlights the need for stronger resilience to create, facilitate and leverage on safe co-creation spheres with consumers, businesses, not-for-profit organizations as well as governmental institutions. The study highlights the need for co-creation spheres, while accentuating the need for relevant resource-challenge balance to ensure business profitability as well all overall ecosystem equilibrium.

Next, the study discusses the article Andrew et al. [ 70 ], which explores the constraints of the Australian government in responding to crises with relevant budgetary action. The study reviews literature on the COVID-19 crisis, as well as public budgeting responses to the health and economic effects of the crisis. The study identifies public budgeting as being neoliberal. This has been evident in the duo phased response strategy to COVID-19 within the Coronavirus Economic Response Package Omnibus Bill (2020) by initially stimulating businesses through the instant asset write-off scheme in the phase first, and individuals through unemployment benefits among others in the second phase. The study in its examinations seeks to offer insights and synthesis of knowledge relevant to other countries in managing and mitigating the fiscal consequences of the COVID-19 crisis. By discussing responses, outcomes and shortcomings the study provides an overview of neoliberalism influenced crisis responses for the objective assessment of multiple governmental responses available.

Lastly, Ivanov and Dolgui [ 73 ] assess the state of global supply chain in the wake of the COVID-19 crisis and provide a methodical taxonomy of supply chain disruptions caused by pandemics. The study highlights the ideas of ripple effects, structural dynamics and network resilience relevant in the COVID-19 supply chain disruption discourse. The study assesses the various ripple effects caused by the pandemic, such as the halting of production by Chrysler Automobiles NV and Hyundai as a result of the lack of parts supplied from China. The study focuses on disruption propagation throughout networks also known as ripple effects and resultant changes within supply chain structures (structural dynamics) from an operational research perspective. The study reviews relevant theories and methodologies to disruption research at network, process and control levels. By reviewing resilience in supply chain literature, the study advocates for the consideration of 5 stages in building resilience. These include anticipation, early detection, containment, control and mitigation and finally elimination. The study thus, provides relevant direction for future research while providing foundational discourse to drive this increasingly important domain of supply chain studies.

Baudier et al . [ 74 ] use survey method to extensively examine the adoption of telemedicine solutions by patients in several countries in Europe and Asia to help avoid the spread of the disease and alleviate the associated impacts of the pandemic, while ensuring a relatively uninterrupted healthcare service provision. The study argues that the development of ICTs, the individual’s adoption rate of devices (tablets, computer, smartphones), the technological advancements of telemedicine tools, and, recently, the worldwide pandemic (COVID-19) are the key drivers of the expansion of healthcare services. The empirical results based on some constructs of the Technology Acceptance Model, Availability, Personal traits, and Perceived Risks emphasize the huge influence of Performance Expectancy, the positive impact of Contamination Avoidance and the negative effect of Perceived Risk on the adoption of Teleconsultation Solutions. Brodie et al. [ 75 ] similarly review the healthcare system, while highlighting the need for a sustained value co-creation perspective for healthcare delivery with the help of integrative technologies. This, the study argued, helps to create stronger resilience through knowledge sharing, flexibility information and learning. These studies highlight the integral need and potential ecosystem resilience has in responding to and mitigating adversity and crisis during a pandemic.

Cluster 2: crisis and strategic management

The second cluster contains a number of articles which highlights the relevance of crisis and strategic management as well as communication, coordination and the media among firms. Kraus et al. [ 24 ] in a qualitative study of family firms in five western European countries, the study examined several strategic and crisis management measures used in adapting to the crisis. The study examined strategic crisis responses including retrenchment, persevering innovating and exit as discussed by Wenzel et al. [ 4 ]. Several firms included in the study begun changing or extending (innovating) their existing business models to take advantage of new consumer demands even though they may have lost a significant portion of their typical revenue streams. Others, however, continued to persevere by maintaining existing business models as a result of extensive investments in systems prior to the pandemic. The study highlighted various changes occurring among these firms. These include an increase solidarity and commitment among employees as well as a focus on increased digitalization. More prominently, although the study provided empirical evidence for and extended the strategic responses proffered by Wenzel et al. [ 4 ], results show that firms use a combination of various coping mechanisms for two main reasons: safeguarding liquidity and improving long-term survival and viability of the company. One strategic response is incapable of achieving both objectives, thus providing a basis for the combination of various strategic responses. The study however showed that, in the beginning stages of the pandemic no firm adopted exiting as a coping mechanism.

The tourism and hospitality industry has received the greatest brunt of the pandemic and as such continues to enjoy a burgeoning interest in performance, and management research. Although various studies have focused on the performance setbacks encountered by firms within this industry [ 76 ], Sigala [ 53 ] highlights the need to effective crisis management strategies. The study attempts to provide transformational remedies by unraveling all aspects of the industry including demand, supply, and other important stakeholders through three identified stages of responding, recovering and restarting. Giousmpasoglou et al. [ 77 ] extend this conversation by highlighting the relevance of managerial roles in effective crisis management. By ensuring that managers anticipate, equip and prepare their teams for crises by identifying, monitoring and mitigating potential vulnerabilities, firms within the hospitality industry will be better placed to manage crisis and reduce economic losses. By expanding this conversation to human resource management, Carnevale and Hatak [ 78 ] advocate for greater support to the workforce as they cope with altered work systems and environments and navigate changing work-family dynamics among others.

Again, we discuss studies in this cluster that highlight how countries and institutions deal with the impacts of the pandemic through communication and media. For example, Viola et al. [ 79 ] use survey data and the logit model to examine the effectiveness of institutional communication in mitigating COVID-19 impacts in Italy. The study also highlights the crucial roles of education, health literacy and the effect of asymmetric information on the effectiveness of institutional communication. The empirical results show that education plays a significant role in understanding communication pillars and building an individual consciousness about the pandemic and its associated impacts. Similarly, Machmud [ 80 ] by means of content analysis, assesses government officials’ communication and coordination intensity on twitter social media in dealing with the impacts of Covid-19 pandemic in Indonesia. The study documents that government officials are intensively building coordination and communication to overcome the performance impact of Covid-19 in Indonesia. The study further shows that the Indonesian President constantly communicates with the national COVID-19 team to ensure that all government agencies at both central and regional levels are actively mobilized and united. The study confirms coordination and communication strategic crisis management vehicles that enable public officials to jointly implement COVID-19 control policies quickly and accurately throughout Indonesia.

We also highlight studies that contribute to the theoretical development on the use of media by individuals to deal with the impacts of the pandemic. By adopting the theory of planned behavior (TPB), Mohammed and Ferraris [ 81 ] analyze the role of social media in reducing the effects of the pandemic by specifically looking at the factors that stimulate individual’s participation in social media during crises. The empirical method from the survey data shows that attitude, perceived behavioral control, subjective norm, hedonic, utilitarian values and trust affect Twitter users’ active participation significantly during the pandemic. The understanding of these driving factors could help enhance user participation, and information dissemination in the era of social distancing and lock-downs. In the same vein, Kim [ 82 ] employs survey data to examine the effect of video games on the psychological of individuals in the era of COVID-19. The study finds that video individual’s negative and positive emotional states while playing a video game increase one’s level of psychological well-being, which also results in loyalty toward the video game. The empirical findings also indicate that individuals’ positive and negative emotional states while playing a video game were obtained from the perceived emotional value of the virtual product, implying that people evaluate the game not only based on time, money and effort, but also based on enjoyment, positive feelings and pleasure from consuming the digital product. The psychological benefits derived will improve the level of positive emotions and reduce the levels of negative emotions while partaking in the recreational activity. The study advocates that video game companies should design more exciting games that offer fun and entertainment to consumers to help improve the psychological well-being of consumers during this crisis.

The last strand of studies in this cluster emphasizes the role of media in overcoming the performance impact of COVID-19 across industries. These studies highlight the significance of the media in enhancing performance of retail supply chains, tourism, and brand engagement (e.g., [ 83 , 84 , 85 ]. For example, Im et al. [ 84 ] develop two joint models with fixed-effects estimations to examine the relationships among the pandemic, online information search, social distancing, and firm performance in the tourism and hospitality industries. The first model explored the relationship among COVID-19, information search, social distancing and stock performance of tourism and hospitality companies. The results reveal that news coverage on COVID-19 significantly impacts information search and social distancing, and social distancing, in turn, exerts an impact on stock performance. The second analysis focused on the effect of the pandemic on hotel reviews through information search and social distancing for tourist attractions at the regional level. The results indicate that when looking at the geographical effect, news coverage and the number of confirmed cases both lead to variations in social distancing and information search for tourist attractions and these behavioral tendencies are influential in hotel selection. Thus, media coverage and the number of confirmed cases in the news significantly influence social distancing actions of consumers which in turn influences the stock performance of tourism and hospitality industries.

Cluster 3: performance outcomes and strategies

The final cluster contains a number of articles which discuss recorded or projected effects of COVID-19 on various business setups while offering specific remedies, and perspectives for sustained resilience and stronger performance. In Ivanov [ 51 ] the impact of COVID-19 on global supply chains is examined using a simulation-based methodology to predict and examine disruption effects on supply chain performance. This groundbreaking study sets the basis for later empirical studies on supply chains resilience and performance in pandemic era. The study primarily analyzes the manner in which simulation-based methodology can be adopted to examine and predict the effect of pandemic on global supply chain performance. The study highlights the need for firms to be resilient against the disruptions, risks and uncertainties caused by the COVID-19 as such epidemics start small but scale fast and spread across vast geographical expanses creating uncertainty and resulting in numerous unknown and usually adverse outcomes. The results of the simulation based on primary and secondary data offers possibility of predicting both long-term and short-term supply chains performance impact of pandemic in different scenarios. The study approach helps to identify the successful and wrong elements of risk preparedness/mitigation and recovery policies when pandemics erupt. The study results indicate that the timing of the opening and closing of facilities at different strata may become a key factor that determines the impact of epidemic outbreak on supply chain performance rather than the speed of epidemic spread or the duration of an upstream disruption. That is, in the event of pandemic propagation, supply chain performance and reaction depend largely on the timing and the scale of disruption propagation and the sequence of facility opening and closing at various supply chains strata.

Ratten [ 60 ] reviews literature on crisis and its effects on entrepreneurship. By focusing more intently on cultural, lifestyle and social changes experienced in society, the study examines how entrepreneurship has changed in the wake of COVID-19. The study highlights the need for stakeholders to be proactive during a crisis, as it presents both an opportunity and a threat. The study advocates for entrepreneurs to build a social movement by considering broader community needs in addition to their business needs. Additionally, the study highlights the need for a focus on societal trends as well as social changes as a way to surmount possible business setbacks as a result of COVID-19, while taking full advantage of new opportunities. By focusing on inter-organizational networks and collaboration, the study posits that entrepreneurs will begin to leverage and create new, relevant and sustainable innovations. Through appropriate information and resource sharing policy can ensure that entrepreneurs are equipped with relevant tools to rejuvenate troubled industries and grow related businesses.

Ratten [ 62 ] examines the extent to which COVID-19 has influenced sports entrepreneurship, creating the need for considering new business models and encouraging creativity. The study examines the intersection between crisis management and sport entrepreneurship and provides concrete paths to resilience, growth and performance success in dealing with COVID-19. The study examines the concept of sports entrepreneurship, and highlights the critical role technological innovation has played in the success of businesses in this domain. Although the health crisis caused by COVID-19 has resulted in the postponement and cancelation of various sports games including Euro 2020, and the Olympics among others, the study suggests that firms may rise above these setbacks with investments in capital and infrastructure to encourage greater customer and fan engagement as a way to be more entrepreneurially oriented.

Ratten [ 61 ] considers the extent to which COVID-19 has influenced educational entrepreneurship in its almost complete shift to online learning. The global education system was profoundly affected in areas of service, research and teaching. However, the study proffers that educational innovation and the leveraging of multifaceted and rich digital learning environments provides sustainable means through which education communities may cope with the devastating effects of COVID-19. By reimagining online teaching and learning experiences, possibly including artificial intelligence-related tools, and adopting a complimentary approach of innovation and empathy, education communities will begin to identify new revenue streams while strengthening existing ones.

Next, we discuss seminal studies that focus on how entities are responding to the impacts of the pandemic for survival and sustainability (e.g., [ 63 , 86 , 87 , 88 ]). Santos et al. [ 63 ] undertake a comparative study across nine countries to unravel the factors that affect COVID-19 infections and deaths across countries to sustain economies. The study specifically looks at socio-economic indicators and COVOD-19 testing, comparison of infection and death rates across countries and the impact of climate on infection rates across countries. The study finds a significant impact of climate change on COVID-19 infection rate. The results also indicate that socio-economic indicators such as security index, innovation, and GDP per capita are important for a country's sustainability, being imperative to respond to anxious moments such as what nations are living from the COVID-19 pandemic. Through content analysis, Hossain [ 89 ] investigates how the sharing economy (SE) is coping with the changing environment triggered by the Covid-19. The study examines SE sector from four main perspectives: service providers, SE firms, regulatory bodies, and service receivers (customers). The study also explores SE along the following themes: income reduction, anxiety, job loss, hygiene and safety, cancelation, overcoming strategy, and outcomes. The study results indicate the devastating impact of the pandemic on the performance of SE firms and service providers such as Airbnb, accommodation hosts, Uber, and their Uber drivers. Therefore, firms and service providers have adopted strategies to survive in business. The study indicates that because of the pandemic, accommodation hosts are looking at long-term tenants and focusing on domestic instead of foreign guests. This is mirrored by Airbnb strategy of beginning to focus more on long-term stays. These overcoming strategies significantly reduce the impact of the pandemic on SE performance.

Directions for future research

Following the critical review of several relevant studies, this study seeks to categorize and highlight important gaps in literature as well as pertinent trends and foci which research may benefit from while offering practical knowledge and solutions for policy and practice. By structuring relevant gaps and research trends into unique categories, the study provides a means to decompose the broad research domain into vital and unique sub-domains, each warranting extensive and in-depth consideration. For instance, the cluster analysis reveals unexplored areas such as the use of digital technologies and big data to boost performance in the era of viral pandemic. For methodological gaps, the studies analyzed are limited in terms of collecting data at the early stages of the pandemic, hence, the need to consider longitudinal data to better understand the performance impact of pandemic. Another methodological gap is that most of the studies use case-study approach. For contextual gap, the cluster analysis shows lack of attention to supply chains reactions under different pandemic plans. The supply chain performance studies also omitted elements such as back-up suppliers, reserved capacities, regional sub-contracting and lead-time reservations, which could obscure managerial insight. The studies are also limited to upstream disruptions, which call for examination of pandemic disruption in downstream supply chains strata and the antecedent impact on forward and backward propagations of ripple effect.

To facilitate research in addressing the theoretical, contextual, and methodological gaps such as those highlighted, we implement a four-step approach to discern future research agenda by adopting content and bibliometric analyses (Bahoo, 89 ). First, we reviewed 50 top-cited articles that make a citation map. Second, we reviewed all the influential and trending articles during the last 6 months (January to July 2021). Third, we reviewed the remaining articles in our sample to circumvent top citation bias. Fourth, we transformed the possible research agenda into research questions and excluded those questions already investigated by researchers. This systematic process produced the 20 future research questions listed in Table 9 . Through an in-depth qualitative and quantitative review, we recommend a need to establish an appropriate pandemic response framework to help businesses, governments and policy makers to maintain resilience besides maintaining public health safety during such crises.

Conclusion and limitations

The study provided an integrative review to map out the COVID-19 performance discourse. The study adopts a systematic approach to identifying relevant literature used in this review. The study performs a performance analysis to identify seminal studies, impactful authors and high-ranking journals and affiliations. Additionally, the study provides a geographical science mapping of research attention. To guide future research direction, the study conducts a keyword analysis and cluster analysis to identify relevant research themes.

Although the study makes relevant contribution to knowledge, and highlights impactful scholars in the field, the list of impactful scholars provided in this article is far from exhaustive. Additionally, the study adopts a combination of the H, G and M indexes as these indices provide some idea of the impact of authors, it must be noted that such analyses are not without fault. As such, future studies may adopt a wider combination of robust indices in assessing performance factors of authors, articles and journals. The research on the impact of covid-19 on firm performance is now developing so the review in this study focused on all firms. Thus, future reviews may look at how the pandemic affects performance of specific firms and/or sectors since different firms may have different growth objectives, which could influence the impact of COVID-19 on these firms.

Availability of data and materials

The data that support the findings of this study are available on request from the corresponding author.

Abbreviations

Coronavirus disease

United States of America

United Kingdom

Service mega-disruptions

Resource-challenges equilibrium

Information and communication technology

Sharing economy

Gross domestic product

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Online consumer resilience during a pandemic: An exploratory study of e-commerce behavior before, during and after a COVID-19 lockdown

Cameron guthrie, samuel fosso-wamba, jean brice arnaud.

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Received 2020 Oct 5; Revised 2021 Jan 30; Accepted 2021 Mar 30; Issue date 2021 Jul.

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The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted retail and accelerated the trend towards electronic commerce. This study explores the reasons for and the implications of this shift. Our study builds on the consumer behavior literature, emerging COVID-19 research, and the environmentally imposed constraints perspective to describe how online purchasing behavior evolved during the COVID-19 crisis. The objective is to better understand how consumers use e-commerce to react to, cope with and adapt to periods of environmentally imposed constraints. Based on multiple sources including transaction and search data from a major French online retailer, we describe how consumer behavior evolves during such stressful life events as COVID-19. Our results support the usefulness of the multi-perspective react-cope-adapt framework of constrained consumer behavior in an online environment.

Keywords: Pandemic, Covid-19, Environmentally imposed constraints, Electronic commerce

Graphical abstract

1. Introduction

The COVID-19 pandemic has strongly disrupted business operations and consumer activity. While its effect on the digital transformation of organizations has been studied, the impact of COVID-19 on consumers and consumption behaviour has received relatively little scholarly attention ( Kim, 2020 ; Verma and Gustafsson, 2020 ).

Industry reports and consumer surveys show that the pandemic has accelerated a trend towards e-commerce that had been observed before the crisis ( Kim, 2020 ). The fear of the pandemic has notably influenced consumer perceptions of the economic and environmental benefits of e-commerce platforms ( Tran, 2021 ). Some authors predict that the digitalisation of the marketplace and the habits learned during the pandemic may bring about structural changes to consumption as individuals maintain their modified behaviours once the pandemic ends ( Kim, 2020 ; Sheth, 2020 ), such as those observed in China in 2002–2003 during the SARS pandemic ( Clark, 2018 ).

Despite a global increase in online purchases since the start of the pandemic, uncertainty around the drivers of online purchasing behaviour remains. Further research is needed to understand how online consumption is evolving throughout the pandemic and the potential role of electronic commerce in a post-COVID-19 world ( Barnes, 2020 ; O'Leary, 2020 ; Pejić-Bach, 2020 ).

This study is an initial effort towards bridging this gap in the literature by exploring how purchasing behaviours evolved before, during, and after a COVID-19 lockdown. More explicitly, this study intends to answer the following research question: How did online purchasing behaviour evolve during the COVID-19 pandemic?

To address our research question, we draw on consumer behaviour literature, emerging COVID-19 research, and the environmentally-imposed constraints perspective to study the online behaviour of new and existing customers of a leading French online retailer. Our research is exploratory and descriptive in nature, seeking “to provide a ‘picture’ of a phenomenon as it naturally occurs” ( Bickman et al., 2009 ) in a relatively unexplored area ( Punch, 2013 ). Following a case study design, we use the extant literature to structure our analysis and use a “pattern matching” procedure to compare empirically based patterns to predicted patterns of behaviour ( Yin, 2009 ).

Our paper contributes to both literature and practice. Firstly, the paper studies how and why consumer behaviour has evolved during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, providing timely insights for marketers and e-tailers. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first paper to explore and explain the evolution of online consumer purchasing behaviour during the pandemic. Secondly, the paper studies changes in consumer behaviour using a theoretical framework based on research into resource scarcity, choice restriction, social comparison, and environmental uncertainty. We believe that this multi-perspective approach best addresses the complexity of consumer reactions and actions throughout the pandemic.

The paper is organized as follows. The first section provides a literature review of consumer behaviour during periods of crisis and presents the theoretical framework that is used to guide our research. The research methods used in data collection and measure are then discussed, followed by a presentation of results. The paper concludes with a discussion and conclusions.

2. Literature review and theoretical framework

2.1. online purchasing behaviour during periods of restriction.

This past decade there has been growing scholarly interest in the influence of constrained and stressful situations on consumer behaviour. This was “perhaps triggered by the 2008 financial crisis, and [is] likely to be accelerated by scarcity related to the COVID-19 global pandemic” ( Goldsmith et al., 2020 ). Despite the increasingly important role of electronic commerce during times of crisis, such as the SARS outbreak ( Forster and Tang, 2005 ), terrorist attacks ( Predmore Carolyn, Rovenpor, Manduley Alfred, & Radin, 2007 ), economic recession ( Sarmento, Marques and Galan - Ladero, 2019 ) and the COVID-19 pandemic (e.g. Watanabe and Omori, 2020 ), few studies have examined how online consumer purchasing behaviour evolves during these periods of restriction.

Recent studies underscore consumer resilience during such times. Hamilton, Mittal, Shah, Thompson, and Griskevicius (2019) develop a framework based on work in resource scarcity, choice restriction, social comparison, and environmental uncertainty to describe the effects of financial constraints on consumer behaviour. After initially reacting to a situation created by a new constraint, consumers devise coping strategies to work within the constraint. Over time, they adapt their consumption behaviours, thus becoming less reactive and more resilient. These three stages - reacting, coping, adapting - “roughly reflect immediate reactions, short term solutions, and long-term adaptations” (p. 286).

Kirk and Rifkin (2020) adapt the react-cope-adapt (RCA) model to analyse consumer behaviour during the COVID-19 pandemic. According to the authors, consumers may react to a pandemic by hoarding goods perceived as scarce and essential. In some cases, they may reject behavioural mandates such as social distancing and mask-wearing. These behaviours are reactions to the perceived threat of the pandemic and an attempt to regain control of lost freedoms. Over time, consumers begin to cope by adopting new behaviours and exerting control in other areas. Coping behaviours include maintaining social connectedness by sheltering in place with friends or family, using video and chat software, adopting domestic animals, engaging in do-it-yourself activities to overcome product shortages, and modifying their perception of brands. Long-term adaptations include changes in consumption habits such as more home-based experiences, increased online purchasing, and retail experiences that facilitate social distancing. Coping strategies deployed to deal with stressful life circumstances often include changes in consumption activities and behaviours ( Mathur et al., 2003 ; Mathur et al., 1999 ). The RCA framework is illustrated in Fig. 1 .

Stages of the React-Cope-Adapt framework.

The professional literature has also reported similar findings. For example, market research firm Neilsen describes six phases based on the study of international consumer goods markets: “proactive health-mind buying”, “reactive health management”, “pantry preparation”, “quarantined living preparation”, “restricted living” and “living a new normal”. 1 The first two phases correspond to the reacting phase, the next three correspond to the coping phase, and the sixth phase corresponds to the adapting phase of the RCA framework.

Other frameworks have also been used to explain consumer responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, most notably the Stimuli-Organism-Response (SOR) framework. The SOR model states that stimuli influence a consumer's emotional state (organism) and subsequent actions (response), such as online purchasing behaviours ( Mehrabian and Russell, 1974 ). This framework has been widely and successfully used in extant retail ( Vieira, 2013 ) and e-commerce literature to explain how consumers react to environmental stimuli such as web atmospheric cues ( Eroglu et al., 2001 ; Richard, 2005 ). More recently, Laato et al. (2020) used the SOR framework to study how exposure to online information sources in the early stages of the pandemic (stimuli) influenced a consumer's level of cyberchondria and his or her intention to make unusual purchases. The authors found that “after the data collection period for the present study ended, consumers quickly adapted to the new normal of COVID-19” and called for more longitudinal studies to capture how behaviours evolve.

As the RCA model allows for the temporal study of behaviour, we will use it to explore how online consumption specifically evolved during the COVID-19 pandemic.

2.1.1. Online reactive purchasing behaviour during COVID-19

According to Sheth (2020) , hoarding was the first immediate effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on consumption and consumer behaviour. During the pandemic, consumers stockpiled essential products such as “toilet paper, bread, water, meat, disinfecting and cleaning products” ( Sheth, 2020 ). Such unusual purchasing behaviour is a common reaction to the uncertainty of future product availability, and has been observed across the globe during the COVID-19 crisis ( Islam et al., 2021 ). Kirk and Rifkin (2020) argue that “if the scarce items are perceived to be important and the threat of continued availability high, consumers will seek to restore control by hoarding.” In a recent study of 211 staff and students at a Finnish University during the COVID-19 pandemic, Laato et al. (2020) found that unusual purchasing behaviour could be partially explained by intentions to self-isolate and the level of anxiety related to health issues. Social media ( Naeem, 2021 ) and public policy ( Prentice et al., 2020 ) have been shown to exacerbate these panic buying tendancies.

Given the likelihood of further waves of COVID-19 and future pandemics, there have been calls to identify and explain the types of products that are being hoarded by consumers ( Kirk and Rifkin, 2020 ). During the SARS pandemic, for example, there was notably a “dramatic rise” in orders for cleaning products, such as bleach from Hong Kong's leading online retailer ( Forster and Tang, 2005 ). During a health crisis, consumers may consider disinfectants and sanitizers as essential purchases to allay health concerns. Purchases of products to limit the health threat of a pandemic may be higher during the reacting period of the crisis.

2.1.2. Online coping purchasing behaviour during COVID-19

The second stage of response to a constraint is coping. After a period of time, consumers adjust their thinking and decision making to attenuate and cope with the constraint ( Hamilton et al., 2019 ). Coping can either be problem-focused or emotion-focused ( Lazarus and Folkman, 1984 ).

Problem focused coping involves actions that directly address the problem and actions that allow the individual to adjust to the situation to make life less stressful. For example, during the SARS epidemic in Hong Kong, online purchases of hand sanitizer and disinfectant, and staples such as rice, oil, meat, fish, and vegetables dramatically increased, as consumers turned to online shopping to maintain some semblance of normalcy during the crisis ( Forster and Tang, 2005 ). The ongoing nature of the COVID-19 crisis has led consumers to reevaluate their spending priorities. According to a survey by McKinsey & Co conducted in the US during the coping phase (July 2020), “spending on essentials is the only category with positive intent” ( Arora et al., 2020 ). In the case of a pandemic, goods essential for survival could include water, food, cooking supplies, protective equipment, and cleaning products.

Emotion-focused coping activities are directed towards an individual's own feelings and emotions and often seek to take one's mind away from the problem. Examples include turning to religion, therapy or distracting oneself ( Carver et al., 1989 ). Consumers may purchase emotion-focused products during the coping phase that allow them to focus on themselves, such as personal care and well-being goods.

Another coping strategy is to seek out social connectedness “not only with other humans, but also with other living beings” ( Kirk and Rifkin, 2020 ). A large number of US households reportedly adopted a pet during the COVID-19 lockdown ( Phillips, 2020 ) and increasingly engaged in DIY pet grooming. 2 A number of pet shops in France also reported giving away guinea pigs and mice ( Grassaud, 2020 ) and an increase in sales of fish and chickens ( Diouris, 2020 ). As supermarkets were often closed during periods of lockdown, pet owners increasingly turned to online merchants for pet care supplies and veterinary products.

2.1.3. Online adaptive purchasing behaviour during COVID-19

Stressful events such as terrorist attacks, natural disasters, and pandemics also result in long-term behavioural shifts and changes in consumption lifestyles “to adapt to new life circumstances” ( Mathur et al., 2003 ). The COVID-19 pandemic, lockdown, and social distancing measures have disrupted buying and shopping practices and led consumers to experiment with new channels and learn new habits. In a recent study, McKinsey & Co. reported that 75% of US consumers had tested new brands or channels during the crisis, with many adopting “digital and contactless services including curbside pickup, delivery, and buying online for in-store pickup” ( Arora et al., 2020 ). Most consumers planned to continue using omnichannel or fully digital retailers once the crisis subsided. Market research firm Neilsen recently reported that Chinese “pandemic-led shifts to further online adoption and an increased focus on neighborhood and small-format stores have become an ongoing normal”. 3

Consumers may discover that online shopping and home delivery is practical, cheaper, reassuring and allows them to overcome the stress imposed by new sanitary rules and regulations in retail outlets. Following the confinement period, customers may be concerned about contamination and adapt their behaviour accordingly ( Hazée and Van Vaerenbergh, 2020 ), such as continuing to shop online.

A final possible behavioural change brought by the pandemic may be the recruitment of previously reticent online consumers. Kim (2020) uses innovation diffusion theory to argue that the pandemic has incited “late adopters” to buy online for the first time. Late adopters learn to online shop during the pandemic, and the convenience and safety of online shopping may help overcome their skepticism and motivate them to continue shopping online after the pandemic ends. Late adopters of online purchasing are typically older consumers ( Liu et al., 2019 ).

2.2. Research proposition

Based on our review of the extant literature, we propose that online consumption behaviour followed three phases and we expect to observe the following pattern of behaviour: Consumers first react to the perceived threat of the pandemic and attempt to regain control of lost freedoms by purchasing and hording products that limit the health threat. Consumers then begin to cope by adopting new behaviours and exerting control in other areas, such as personal well-being. Finally, consumers become less reactive and adapt their consumption habits to the new normal, continuing to purchase products online.

3. Research methodology

We employed a descriptive single-case research design to explore online consumer behaviour during the pandemic. A descriptive case based approach is appropriate when an area is relatively new or unexplored ( Punch, 2013 ). This is notably the case for online behaviour during times of crises. Also, there have been a number of calls in the literature for more empirical observation and descriptions of customer behaviour during the COVID-19 crisis ( Kirk and Rifkin, 2020 ; O'Leary, 2020 ; Pejić-Bach, 2020 ; Sheth, 2020 ). Consistent with our research proposition, the unit of analysis was the consumer cohort that purchased online during the period.

3.1. Case study planning and design

Descriptive research seeks to make causal propositions by exploring and describing links between independent and dependant variables. Descriptive designs are driven by questions that are concerned with quantifying an area or a phenomenon, such as “describing only one variable, comparing the variable to a particular standard, or summarizing the relationship between two or more variables.” ( Bickman et al., 2009 ). Such descriptive, causal propositions contribute to building a foundation for understanding relationships before explanatory research formally tests them.

Case studies often form the basis of descriptive research as they allow for a rich contextual description of the phenomenon under study. Researchers often select cases that “tell a lot about the underlying conditions and causal mechanisms at work” ( Reiter, 2013 , p. 8). The case study research method is particularly suitable when the research question is “how” and “why” in nature, where there is no need to control variables and where there is a focus on contemporary events ( Yin, 2009 ).

The research site for our case study was a major French online retailer of para-pharmaceutical, health care, well-being goods and beauty products (“CyberPharma” 4 ). CyberPharma is the industry leader in France with a turnover of over 100 million euros per year.

The company was selected for the study as it was considered to be a “representative” or “typical” e-commerce company. Following Yin, 2009 , a single case study is justified on the grounds of its representative nature, where “the objective is to capture the circumstances and conditions of an everyday or commonplace situation” (p. 48). The research team considered CyberPharma's revenues, product range, headcount and business processes to be representative of an e-commerce company in France. CyberPharma management also offered privileged access to its online transaction and search data and was interested in reflecting on changes in customer behaviour during the Covid-19 crisis.

A common criticism of single case study research is its generalizability. The goal of a single case study design is theoretical or analytical generalizability rather than statistical generalization. As the study's objective was to test the pertinence of the RCA framework to describe online purchasing behaviour during a pandemic, the single case design using a “typical” case was considered appropriate. A second concern may be the representativity of CyberPharma. While the company was considered an appropriate case for theory development, studies of other companies in other sectors respresent an interesting avenue for future research (see section 5.2 ).

Multiple data types and sources were used to draw a rich picture of consumer online purachsing behaviour during the pandemic, and a “pattern matching” technique was used to test the theoretical framework ( Yin, 2009 ). Pattern matching involves comparing the observed pattern of behaviour from case data with an expected pattern of behaviour based on the extant literature, and that has been formulated ex ante ( Hak and Dul, 2009 ). If there is a match, the case study supports the proposition and confirms the theory; if there is a mismatch, the data disconfirm the theory and an alternative explanation for the pattern is required ( Almutairi et al., 2014 ; Trochim, 1989 ). Fig. 2 illustrates the pattern-matching process.

The pattern-matching process.

Following our research proposition, we expect to observe the following pattern of behaviour: Consumers first react to the perceived threat of the pandemic and attempt to regain control of lost freedoms, before coping by adopting new behaviours and exerting control in other areas, and then adapting their consumption habits to the new normal and continuing to purchase online.

3.2. Data collection

We collected and analysed data at two levels for the purposes of our study. Firstly, French country-level data was collected from multiple sources to describe the trend in COVID-19 contagion and deaths, the evolution in consumer sentiment and e-commerce activity over the period. Sentiment data was used to establish a periodization following the RCA framework, and e-commerce data was used to verify that CyberPharma's activity was representative of the national trend.

Secondly, data was collected from CyberPharma to construct a pattern of behaviour for the consumer cohort that frequented CyberPharma's website during the period. Management of CyberPharma provided both transaction and search data. Transaction data included online sales for the period beginning 12 months prior to the COVID-19 pandemic (January 2019) to the second month following the end of the mandated shelter-in-place restrictions in France (July 2020). Search data included all search terms keyed in by website visitors over the seven month period from January 2020 to July 2020. All data were anonymised, and it was not possible to identify individual customers. Interviews were conducted with management to understand the organizational challenges that accompanied the crisis, and the company's social media activity was also analysed.

The following section first outlines the evolution of the COVID-19 pandemic in France during its first six months (February to July 2020), and its impact on consumer sentiment and electronic commerce at a national level. This period covers the start of the pandemic and the first mandated shelter-in-place restrictions in France. Online purchasing, search and social media activity at CyberPharma are then presented and analysed. Following our pattern matching process, the observed pattern is described and then compared to the predicted pattern based on our literature review.

4.1. The COVID-19 pandemic in France

The COVID-19 crisis began in France in January 2020, and the number of daily cases peaked three months later. The evolution of COVID-19 related hospitalizations and deaths in France is provided in Fig. 3 , and a timeline of key dates of the COVID-19 pandemic in France is presented in Table 1 .

Number of COVID-19 cases and deaths in France per month (2020). Source: www.santepubliquefrance.fr .

Key dates of the COVID-19 pandemic in France.

https://www.franceinter.fr/emissions/l-invite-de-8h20-le-grand-entretien/l-invite-de-8h20-le-grand-entretien-18-fevrier-2020.

During January and February the French government relied on existing structures and procedures to contain the pandemic. On February 18, the Minister for Health, Olivier Véran declared that “France is ready as we have an extremely solid health system”. 5 Desson, Weller, McMeekin, and Ammi (2020) , note that the French government “was relatively complacent as the first cases were counted and only implemented severe measures once infections began to rapidly rise” (p. 437).

As the virus continued to spread, the WHO declared COVID-19 a pandemic and world stock markets crashed on March 11. In France, social distancing measures including the closure of schools, restaurants, and non-essential business activities were introduced throughout the first two weeks of March, with President Macron declaring on March 16 that “we are at war with this virus”. 6 Shelter-in-place orders were effective starting March 17.

Shelter-in-place orders and travel restrictions were gradually lifted starting May 11, but cafés, schools, and restaurants did not reopen until the start of June. In early June, non-essential businesses reopened and an increasing number of workers were summoned back to work. By mid-June, President Macron declared that “we can turn the page of the first act of the crisis that we have just been through”. 7

4.1.1. Evolution of French consumer sentiment

Consumer sentiment in France evolved throughout the pandemic ( Kruspe et al., 2020 ). The general public was not particularly alarmed by the virus until late February, as illustrated by activity at the annual Salon de l’Agriculture held in Paris from February 22 to March 1 2020. The initial attendance levels and number of exhibitors were equivalent to previous years, but as the number of cases grew in late February attendance began falling and the final day of the Salon was cancelled. In total 483 000 people visited the Salon compared to 563 000 over the same period in 2019.

This increasing public recognition of the gravity of the crisis can also be observed in the sharp rise in COVID-19 news coverage from mid-February until the end of March. In a study of 33,864 French news reports Starosta et al. (2020) found that the majority carried negative sentiment until the start of the shelter-in-place period in mid-March and that the level of news coverage was correlated with Covid-19 related searches on Google.com . News reports, media negativity and related online searches all declined during the lockdown period (mid-March to mid-May).

Further analysis of consumer reaction to the pandemic was undertaken to verify whether it could be periodized according to the react-cope-adapt framework. Sentiment analysis was conducted on a dataset of 2,598,249 French language tweets that used the same daily confimement hashtag (e.g. #LockdownDay27 8 ) collected between March 17 and May 11 2020 by Balech et al. (2020) . Twitter was considered an appropriate medium to analyse as it is a “network where states of mind can express themselves freely” and the development of the hashtag helped “share experience and mood” (p. 1). Each tweet had been coded using Plutchick’s (1982) typology of eight basic emotions (anger, fear, anticipation, trust, surprise, sadness, joy, and disgust) based on word occurrence using the National Research Council Canada (NRC) emotion lexicon ( Mohammad and Turney, 2013 ). The dataset was further analysed by the authors using the R statistics language.

According to a functional approach to emotions, individuals cognitively evaluate the beneficial or harmful events that occur in their environment, react by generating introspective feeling states (“emotions”) and engage in behaviours to deal with the stimuli. Emotions are part of a “complex chain of reactions which has adaptive value for the individual in dealing with various kinds of life crises or survival problems” ( Plutchik, 1982 , p. 543) and have been shown to be powerful drivers in consumer decision making and behaviour ( Gaur et al., 2014 ; Lerner et al., 2015 ). In this study, we use Plutchick’s (1982) typology to establish the react-cope-adapt periodization.

In this study, we propose that a dominant basic emotion may describe each of the three phases of the react-cope-adapt framework. During the reacting phase, consumers are expected to react to the perceived threat of the pandemic. Following Plutchik (2001) , the main basic emotion is fear , an emotional response to an environmental threat. During the coping phase, consumers cope by adopting new behaviours and engaging in new activities to reduce stress. The main basic emotion may be joy , which corresponds to the gain and possession of a new and valued object or resource. During the adapting phase, consumers adapt their behaviours to the new normal. According to Plutchik (2001) , the discovery of such “new territory” may evoke emotions of anticipation as consumers begin to “map” their transformed environment ( Gaur et al., 2014 ).

The emotions of fear, joy and anticipation identified from word occurrence in the tweet dataset were charted over the confinement period ( Fig. 4 ).

Evolution of sentiment in France during the confinement period (chart from March 9 to May 10, 2020).

All three emotions varied over the period, peaking or troughing sharply in mid-April with the announcement of an extension to shelter-in-place orders. Fear steadily increased over the first month of the confinement period (weeks 11–13), before falling from the end of March (week 14) until mid-April (week 17). The trend in this emotion may indicate that the reacting phase lasted the month of March. Levels of joy increased steadily from week 11 onwards, before peaking in the last week of March and stabilising for the remainder of the period, apart from the trough in week 17. This trend may indicate that the coping phase began in early April as consumers began experiencing joy through their coping strategies, often involving the discovery of new activites and resources, such as available time. Anticipation rose throughout March (weeks 11–14), fell in early April and then increased as the confinement period was expected to end (weeks 16 and 19). This trend may indicate that the adapting period began following the end of the lockdown period, in the second half of May or early June, as consumers begin to map out their new environment.

Kruspe et al. (2020) reported similar results from a study of 79,000 geotagged English language tweets containing a COVID-19 keyword. In France “towards the end of the considered period [April 2020], keyword-only [positive] sentiment actually starts to increase, which is also seen in Italy and Germany. This could indicate a shift to a more hopeful outlook with regards to the pandemic”.

Based on the evolution of sentiment over the first six months of the pandemic in France, we propose the following periodization:

Reacting phase: March 2020

Coping phase: April and May 2020

Adapting phase: June and July 2020

While there may be a degree of overlap between these phases as several emotions can be experienced simultaneously ( Manthiou et al., 2020 ), monthly delimiters are used to facilitate the interpretation of data.

4.1.2. Electronic commerce activity in France

The closure of all “non essential” stores during the lockdown period (March to May 2020) led to a surge in electronic commerce activity, as shown in Fig. 5 .

Year-on-year growth in e-commerce sales in France (June 2019 to June 2020). Source: Kantar Worldpanel. 9 .

While most online retailers reported a fall in traffic and sales during March 2020, a small number of product categories experienced exceptionally strong growth and drove an e-commerce rally in the last week of March and early April. According to the French Federation of e-commerce and distance selling (FEVAD):

“The three weeks of March were marked by an unprecedented overall decline in sales of non-food products on the internet, compared to the week preceding the crisis. This decrease started on March 9, the week shelter-in place restrictions were first announced. Then the gap widened the following week as restrictions took hold and stores closed. It is only from the end of March, that the sales curve picks up after the shock of containment had passed.

This recovery was largely driven by certain product categories, including IT, indoor activities and gardening, for which sales accelerate very clearly in the week following the start of confinement (+27%), before plateauing over the following two weeks." 10

Fast moving consumer goods (+55%), pharmacy and health (+49%) and home goods (+46%) in particular experienced strong year-on-year growth during the lockdown period ( Fig. 6 ).

Year-on-year growth in e-commerce sales in France by sector during lockdown (March to May 2020). Source: Kantar Worldpanel 8 .

A similar result was reported by Forster and Tang (2005) during the SARS epidemic in Hong Kong when the online supermarket, Park’N Shop saw sales “dramatically” increase over the period and remain at high year-over-year levels during the following months.

After the lockdown period, online purchases of essential goods remained stable, and the sales of clothes and accessories, cultural products, home improvement supplies, and materials for indoor and outdoor activities returned to pre-lockdown levels. 11

A study of French consumers during and after the confinement period found that most online buying behaviour during the lockdown was driven by the stress and constraints attributable to the COVID-19 crisis.

“Their motivations are closely linked to the health context. Online shopping has enabled them to have access to essential products (for 31%), to withstand the constraints related to confinement (32.3%) and to avoid exposure to health risks (51.4%)”. 12

The study also reported that over one-third of all French online consumers believed that the lockdown period had shifted their consumption habits: Consumers plan to buy online more regularly “to continue to remain safe during this prolonged health crisis.” Consumer expectations of local stores also changed, with three out of four French consumers expecting to use home delivery services in the future. The report concluded that “this unprecedented episode will therefore have initiated or even converted some Internet users to online shopping”.

4.2. Activity at CyberPharma during the pandemic

CyberPharma was founded in 2008 by two pharmacists. It has since grown to a company with an annual turnover of 100 million euros. The company sells a range of items online organized across fifteen product families (see Table 2 ).

Product families distributed online by CyberPharma.

Fig. 7 confronts the rise in monthly orders to the trend in reported COVID-19 cases. After remaining stable in January compared to the previous year (+2.3% year-over-year growth (YoY)), online orders significantly increased in February (+14.2%) and throughout the lockdown period in March (+23.8%), April (+34.6%), May (+35.4%) and also as restrictions were eased in June (+21.3%) and July (+22.6%).

CyberPharma and national e-commerce activity vs COVID-19 cases in France (January to June 2020).

A similar trend can be observed in average order value and the average number of items per transaction ( Fig. 8 ).

Average order value and items per transaction at CyberPharma (January to July 2020) (base 100 in January 2020).

The number of items per order first increased during March before falling in May and plateauing in June and July. Online shoppers bought a higher number of products per order at the start of the pandemic in France (reacting phase).

CyberPharma's results contrast with the overall performance of e-commerce in France that fell significantly during the month of March before recovering and plateauing in April and May. However, they are consistent with the pharmacy and health product category ( Fig. 6 ) that experienced strong year-on-year growth during the period at a national level. CyberPharma management reacted swiftly to the pandemic by focused on fulfilling the sharp rise in online orders.

4.2.1. Management reaction to the pandemic

The spike in online activity at CyberPharma was fueled by significant increases in orders, repeat orders and order size. Interviews were undertaken with the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) and the Head of Data Analytics (HDA) to gain further insight into the way the company reacted to the pandemic.

“We had twice as many new customers in March as compared to February this year because of Covid, and the retention rate, the share of customers we kept from one month to the other went from 7% in February to 10% in April. Most of our products last three months, you know creams or supplements you don't buy every month, right? But from March to April we had a lot more new customers and 10% of them, 50% more of them basically came back. The average order size clearly jumped for new and old customers alike.” HDA, 22/07/20

As website visits and orders began rapidly increasing in February, CyberPharma management focused on order fulfillment and ceased all marketing and promotional activities. The rapid increase in orders led the company to recruit 100 pickers across the first two months of the pandemic. Picking involves locating products and grouping them together to be packed and shipped.

“We quickly saw that we were way above our forecast. And based on that we tried to gauge how much more workforce we needed because we knew that to get that many orders, you know how many people you need to get and need to train.” CEO, 22/07/20

The company believes it benefited from the simplification of processes and new technologies that had been deployed when it moved to its new warehouse 2017.

“It used to be way more complex for somebody to actually know where the product's were, and to know what products to pick. They had to find and read printed information to understand if they had the right products, and all areas look much the same in the warehouse. It's not scalable. Using radios that tell you what to do is scalable, and so that's one of the reasons why we I think we survived COVID.” CEO, 22/07/20

Moving to the new warehouse had also provided practice in managing customer relations during a crisis.

“The good thing is we've been through some crises of our own making. We moved, for instance, and moving while your still operating, well you can imagine that you have like, products here, products in the warehouse already or not; it's a nightmare ! It was a good rehearsal for what we went through with COVID in terms of like crisis management, and how you communicate with customers.” CEO, 22/07/20

All marketing, advertising and social media activity was reduced during the lockdown period to focus on order fulfillment.

“I said to the people in charge of customer service and people are in charge of like social media to ‘Stop everything ! Stop talking, stop talking ! The only thing that people need to know is that we are alive, we know that they have a order with us and we are working. Period.’ We even shut down our phone service during the crisis. No more formal communication. Why? Because we had nothing interesting to say except just like, ‘yeah, we know we're late’. During the crisis, as soon as we hit more than 48 hours, we sent an email automatically saying ‘We know, we haven't sent your order. It's still in our system. We know we have it, we're going to tackle it, we're going to handle it and you're going to receive an email as soon as it’s done.’ And this helped a lot. Some customers replied and most simply said ‘Thanks’ or ‘Good luck’”

An examination of social media and website activity at CyberPharma confirms this fall in publications ( Fig. 9 ) as the company reduced its activity to essential, crisis related communications.

Engagement levels with web content (articles, blogs, news) (January to July 2020). Source: www.buzzsumo.com .

Social media engagement (i.e. total likes and shares) also significantly fell over the period compared to the previous year. The exception was for the month of April when customers engaged strongly with an article entitled “Antibacterial disinfectant gel, hydroalcoholic gel”.

According to management, customer acceptance of the company's fulfillment difficulties was aided by the publicly known problems encountered by e-commerce in general during the crisis.

“Why it worked is because at the same time, Amazon went from like 24 hour delivery to a week or two so everybody knew there was a mess. They knew it and accepted it. But what they appreciated was us saying that ‘this is the situation’ and ‘this is solid’. So for instance, in terms of emailing, normal advertising, and advertising on social media, it was a distraction and proved that you don't really address the main point: their frustrations.” CEO, 22/07/20

We will now examine how online purchasing evolved throughout the period under study.

4.2.2. Online purchasing behaviour at CyberPharma

A closer inspection of sales by product family in Table 3 reveals that the “personal hygiene” product family showed the strongest growth of all product families during the reacting phase of the crisis (March, +56% YoY).

Year-over-year growth in sales by product family during the COVID-19 crisis.

The two best-selling product categories in this family during this period were “home and environment” products including disinfectants and sanitizers (+100.7% YoY) and hand hygiene products, including soaps and hydroalcoholic gels (+474%). Purchases of products that limit the health threat increased during the reacting phase (March).

During April and May, several product families exhibited strong YoY growth. Sales of face masks, gloves, and other protective equipment (+76.8%) drove the growth of the “Equipment and accessories” category. Other essential para-pharmaceutical purchases made during this period included disinfectants and sanitizers (+95.9%) and soaps and hydroalcoholic gels (+1687.4%). The share of essential para-pharmaceutical goods increased during the coping period (April–May). Online sales of personal care and well-being goods also increased significantly over this same period. Product families with Year-over-Year growth above 50% across April and May include the “Organic and natural “(+51%), “Hair care” (+60%), “Body care” (+68%), “Makeup and perfume” (+50%) and “Face care” (+64%) families. Veterinary products also experienced significant growth in online sales over April and May (+189%). This growth was driven by sales of products for cats (+164.2%), dogs (+198.5%), and exotic pets, such as rabbits, rodents, ferrets, birds, and reptiles (+165.7%).

4.2.3. Online search terms at CyberPharma

The growth in search terms used by website visitors confirms these temporal trends (see Table 4 , strongest growth in bold). During the reacting phase (March), website visitors searched for products to limit the health threat such as hydroalcoholic gel (+58.9%), thermometers (+18%), gloves (+32%), paracetamol (7.5%) and hydroxychloroquine (+7305.5%).

Top 10 search term categories (month-on-month % growth).

Growth in search queries for masks (+17.2%) and gloves (+56.7%) was strongest in the coping phase (April and May).

Customers also modified their buying behaviour during the pandemic by reordering more regularly. The percentage of customers reordering in the months following their first order is reported in Table 5 .

Year-over-year percentage change in reorders by month.

We note that there was an increase in reorders staring in February that became more pronounced in March and April. For example, customers recruited in April purchased more online in May (+2.8%), June (+1.1%) and July (1.0%) compared to the same period the previous year. This year-over-year difference remains positive but falls in May and June, raising the question as to whether customers will continue new behaviours during the adapting period.

In July 2020, the Head of Data Analytics noted that more time was need to confirm this trend:

“The reorder rate has gone down a bit, but not to where it was before. I think it's still a bit early to conclude on this, for me at least until the end of September.” HDA, 22/07/20

CyberPharma also saw a subtle shift in customer profiles during the pandemic. Table 6 presents the year-over-year change in demographic profiles measured by age bracket and gender.

Year-over-year percentage change in customer profiles.

Across the six-month period, the number of older customers increased to the detriment of younger customers. This trend was pronounced across all three phases (reacting, coping and adapting) for the “over 65” age bracket.

4.3. Pattern matching

Following our literature review, the expected pattern of behaviour was that consumers first reacted to the perceived threat of the pandemic, then coped by adopting new behaviours and exerting control in other areas, and finally adapted their consumption habits to the new normal.

We observed the presence of these three distinct phases in both the evolution of sentiment and in various purchasing behaviours during the period.

During the reacting phase (March 2020), the average number of products and value per order increased and peaked before falling from April to July. This result is consistent with our expectation that consumers would engage in unusual purchasing behaviour in possible reaction to the uncertainty of future product availability. The strongest year-on-year growth in sales of disinfectants, santizers, soaps and hydroalcoholic gels was also observed during this phase, and website searches for products to limit the health threat saw exceptional month-on-month growth in March. These results match the expectation that consumers would increase their purchases of disinfectants and sanitizers during a health crisis to allay sanitary concerns.

During the coping phase (April and May), consumers were expected to cope with the crisis by adopting new behaviours and exerting control in other areas. This pattern was firstly observed in strong year-on-year growth in sales and website searches for essential para-pharmaceutical “problem focused” goods such as disinfectants and protective equipment. Secondly, the strong year-on-year growth in sales of “emotion focused” products including organic and natural, hair, body and face care categories matched the expected pattern that consumers would focus on themselves to take their mind away from the problem.

During the adapting phase (June–July), consumers were expected to become less reactive and adapt their consumption habits to the new normal. The observations partially matched this pattern. Firstly, reacting and coping behaviours, such as purchases of protective and well-being products did fall by the months of June and July, consistent with the expectation that consumers would be less reactive in the adapting phase. The increase in the percentage of older customers purchasing online and reordering rates during the three phases of the crisis also match the expected pattern of modified consumption behaviours. However, these increases were smaller following the confinement period (June) making it difficult to conclude whether these changes were permanent. More data is needed to verify whether behaviours durably changed in the third phase of the crisis.

Table 7 resumes the results of the pattern matching process by response stage.

Results of the pattern matching process by response stage.

5. Discussion

The objective of this study was to improve our understanding of how online purchasing behaviours evolve during life-changing events, such as the COVID-19 crisis. The descriptive case study design sought to explore underlying behavioural motivations and causal mechanisms. Our results have several theoretical and managerial implications.

5.1. Theoretical and managerial implications

Based on an environmentally imposed constraints perspective, we posited that online consumer shopping behaviour reflects actions taken to react to, cope with, and adapt to a crisis. Based on data collected during the COVID-19 pandemic, the results provide overall support for our research proposition and support the usefulness of the react-cope-adapt framework in describing e-commerce behaviours in times of crises.

Our results also suggest extensions to the RCA framework, including different types of online coping strategies based on the work of Lazarus and Folkman (1984) . We notably found that online consumers engage in both problem-oriented and emotion-oriented coping behaviours. Online purchases of essential para-pharmaceutical items increased during the adapting phase, which corresponds to a problem-focused coping strategy where purchases address the health situation directly or allow buyers to adjust to the situation by making life less stressful. Online purchases of personal care and well-being goods during the coping phase showed that emotion-focused coping strategies were also at work during the pandemic for some consumers. Year-over-year growth in purchases of organic and natural products, such as cosmetics, gemmotherapy, herbal medicines, essential oils, and aromatherapy, as well as personal hair, body and face care, makeup, and perfume, may be explained by a desire for some consumers to take one's mind away from the COVID-19 situation. Our results extend the RCA framework and contribute to the e-commerce literature by demonstrating that stressful life events such as a pandemic may produce online purchasing behaviours as part of problem-focused and emotion-focused coping strategies.

Our study also contributes to the growing body of research on online “unregulated buying” such as impulse, unplanned, and compulsive buying ( LaRose, 2001 ). Little research has explored the relationship between online purchasing and hoarding. We have learned that individuals first reacted to the pandemic by purchasing products that would help limit the health threat, such as disinfectants and hydroalcoholic gels. The increase in the average number of items per order during the month of March may indicate that consumers engaged in unusual purchasing behaviour such as the hoarding of essential para-pharmaceutical goods. While this behaviour was observed anecdotally throughout the pandemic ( Kirk and Rifkin, 2020 ; Sheth, 2020 ), the use of this e-commerce statistic (average items per order) to detect it online is novel. Further research could explore how online shopping influences hoarding behaviours.

Our results have several implications for management. Firstly, the RCA model implies patterns of buying behaviour throughout a crisis that have implications for product assortments and marketing campaigns. Online retailers can anticipate changes in behaviour during such crises and adapt accordingly. Secondly, product offers and promotions can be tailored to problem-based and emotion-based coping strategies. Finally, online retailers and their supply chain partners can also use the RCA model to fine-tune stock management within the supply chain during such a crisis, and thus limit product shortages akin to those reported during the reacting phase of the COVID-19 pandemic.

5.2. Limitations and future research

The results of this study should be interpreted in light of several limitations. Firstly, this study was descriptive in nature and the research propositions should now be tested with an explanatory research design. Secondly, we only used data from one company. Although para pharmaceutical and healthcare products cover some essential and discretionary needs and allowed us to sketch a rich picture of behaviour during the pandemic, future research could complete the picture of online purchasing behaviours by studying other product categories. Thirdly, online transactions were not associated with customer data, making it impossible to verify if a buyer's profile influenced purchasing behaviours. Fourthly, the time period following orders made after the lockdown period may have been too short to detect adaptive behaviours. Further research could observe online purchasing behaviours over a longer time period.

6. Conclusion

Our study builds on the consumer behaviour literature, emerging COVID-19 research, and the environmentally imposed constraints perspective to describe the online behaviour of new and existing customers of a leading French healthcare e-commerce site. We found that online consumers react, cope with, and then adapt to such stressful life events, thus validating the usefulness of the react-cope-adapt framework of constrained consumer behaviour in an online environment. Our results are mainly of use for online and local retailers to adjust their promotion, assortment, and distribution strategies to better deal with such stressful events in the future, and as a starting point for scholars to build causal theories of consumer behaviour during such times of crisis.

https://www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/article/2020/key-consumer-behaviour-thresholds-identified-as-the-coronavirus-outbreak-evolves/ .

https://www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/article/2020/shoppers-reprioritized-sense-of-self-care-leads-to-a-rise-in-diy-pet-grooming/ .

https://www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/article/2020/chinas-shifting-retail-landscape-signals-the-permanence-of-change-post-covid-19/ .

The name of the company has been changed to preserve anonymity.

https://www.franceinter.fr/emissions/l-invite-de-8h20-le-grand-entretien/l-invite-de-8h20-le-grand-entretien-18-fevrier-2020 .

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/16/world/europe/coronavirus-france-macron-travel-ban.html .

https://www.wsj.com/articles/macron-seeks-to-turn-page-on-coronavirus-in-france-11592168578 .

In French, #ConfinementJour27 was used to mark the 27 th day of the lockdown. The hashtag incremented by one digit with each day of the lockdown.

Based on a consumer panel of 12 000 individuals, June 2020. Consumer services excluded.

https://www.fevad.com/retour-sur-5-semaines-de-crise-COVID-pour-le-e-commerce/ .

https://www.fevad.com/les-habitudes-dachat-en-ligne-entre-confinement-et-deconfinement/ .

https://www.fevad.com/barometre-trimestriel-de-laudience-du-e-commerce-en-france-enquete-e-commerce-et-confinement/ .

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“The New Online Normal”: Exploring Online Trends on E-commerce and Internet Use During and After COVID-19 Pandemic

• First Online: 24 September 2023

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• Teresa B. Treviño Benavides 4  

Part of the book series: Management and Industrial Engineering ((MINEN))

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The COVID-19 pandemic brought a bigger and rapid adoption of digital technologies, as people needed to communicate, work, study, entertain themselves, and buy without leaving home. In fact, the pandemic serves as an accelerator for a structural change in online consumption and the digital transformation in the marketplace, organizations, and society. With this in mind, the purpose of this chapter is to review and reflect on the online trends derived from the coronavirus pandemic. Particularly, by reviewing recent literature on the topic, and presenting results of an exploratory survey, it will shed light on how people have changed and shifted some consumption patterns online with respect to (a) e-commerce, (b) Internet and social media use, and (c) demand for online services. Overall, this chapter will explore observed changes and trends around people and technology during and after the coronavirus pandemic to serve as a basis for future directions for organizations and brands.

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Benavides, T.B.T. (2024). “The New Online Normal”: Exploring Online Trends on E-commerce and Internet Use During and After COVID-19 Pandemic. In: Machado, C., Davim, J.P. (eds) Management for Digital Transformation. Management and Industrial Engineering. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42060-3_6

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