ONLINE TRADING DEVELOPMENT IN CONDITIONS OF COVID-19 PANDEMIC CRISIS

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a significant impact on business in Ukraine and around the world. Thus, quarantine has almost stopped a number of industries, including retail (except for food), hotel and restaurant business, air transportation. Due to the introduction of quarantine, domestic enterprises froze investment processes. Most outlets were not ready for the abrupt closure of physical outlets and the inability to sell off-the-shelf products, necessitating a rapid transition to online commerce. Accordingly, it was the pandemic crisis that became the catalyst for e-commerce. However, it should be noted that many companies found it difficult to make a full or partial transition due to lack of experience and understanding of promising ways of development as a subject of the e-commerce market. Accordingly, we can talk about the prospects and the need to study certain issues of e-commerce, in particular in Ukraine. The aim of the work is to identify ways to develop online trade in Ukraine under the influence of the pandemic crisis. The research used methods of comparison, systematization and logical generalization, trend analysis (using Google Trends), bibliometric analysis (using VOSviewer 1.6.16). The authors conducted a trend analysis, the results of which show a gradual increase in the number of requests by 2018 and a rapid increase since 2019, which is most likely due to a pandemic, when many stores faced problems with product sales. The results of bibliometric analysis show a change in the trend of publishing activity towards the transition from online trading in combination with marketing management, trade marketing tools, consumer behavior analysis to algorithmization and mathematical modeling of consumer behavioral patterns. There is a clear tendency to increase public and scientific interest in this issue. At the same time, the share of domestic publications on this topic is insignificant. Based on the analysis of trends in online trade, the authors proposed promising ways to develop it, identified their advantages, disadvantages and complexity of implementation in Ukraine.