The digital shift powering small business recovery

The general perception is that small businesses are in distress, more so after the blow of the Covid-19 lockdowns, from which their recovery has been slow. However, the findings from a new survey of such firms, led by my colleague, Dr Tanu Goyal, at ICRIER, have challenged these notions (https://bit.ly/4diX9N1). This survey shows that firms that started selling online through e-commerce websites have significantly improved their performance. Their sales and profit margins have increased, and they are hiring more than those businesses that aren’t selling to online shoppers as yet. This is the third round of the survey, first done in 2021, to help assess the fallout of the Covid-19 lockdowns on small businesses. More or less, the same firms are tracked in the survey every year, which makes their findings all the more valuable and insightful for understanding their growth and development. The first edition had shown that by selling online, firms tried to keep afloat amid restrictions on the physical movement of goods and people. At that time, getting onto e-commerce platforms was a survival strategy to beat the stoppage of usual business by accessing new markets and consumers. The second round of the survey, conducted in 2022, also included those firms that had still not done this. The idea was to draw comparisons between th

This article was originally published on June 01, 2025.