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.

COVID-19大流行已经破坏了零售业，并加速了电子商务发展的趋势。这项研究探讨了这种转变的原因及其含义。我们的研究建立在消费者行为文献，新兴的COVID-19研究以及环境强加约束条件的观点基础上，以描述在COVID-19危机期间在线购买行为如何演变。目的是更好地了解消费者如何使用电子商务来应对，应对和适应环境约束时期。基于包括法国一家主要在线零售商的交易和搜索数据在内的多种来源，我们描述了在诸如COVID-19这样的紧张生活事件中，消费者行为是如何演变的。