Sales of devotional items in online stores are on the rise

Online devotional stores are opening more willingly and selling more than before the pandemic, according to data from e-commerce platform Shoper. Vendors are attracted to the Internet by the broad capabilities of online stores and the change in customers' shopping habits.

Almost all industries of stores operating online have recorded extraordinary growth in the past several months. However, in the case of the devotional category, this growing trend continues despite the lifting of virtually all restrictions on stationary trade already. What's more, the surge in shoppers and stores has come at a time when first communions, baptisms and weddings have often been postponed to the last minute. These are events that are among the main shopping occasions for devotional stores.

Statistics of the online store platform Shoper show that the total value of transactions in devotional stores and those using the Shoper Payments service, in 2020 was three times higher than in 2019. In turn, the total value of transactions in the first half of 2021 is 175 percent of the value of transactions in the first half of 2020.

- A few years ago, analysts noted with no small amount of surprise that devotional items were mainly bought online by young people, although it is, after all, the older generations who are associated with religiosity. It seems that seniors previously stocked up on stationary stores at churches, for example. During the pandemic, they often discovered for the first time that everything is now available online and shopping is really easy. A similar effect was also seen in other industries, and it was all the stronger the more stationary trade dominated them before the pandemic, explains Artur Halik of the online shopping platform Shoper.

Partly responsible for the increase in devotional sales in online stores is the growth in the number of stores themselves. There are now more than twice as many stores selling devotional items on the Shoper platform as there were in 2019.

- Familiarity with local specifics, that is, in the case of devotional items, the calendar of holidays and approximately religious celebrations, is proving to be a great asset for domestic manufacturers, who are becoming more and more efficient in selling their products online. They have more and more modern tools for this, such as Shoper, which allow them to launch online sales virtually overnight, notes Artur Halik. - The pandemic proved to be an additional, powerful impetus for setting up new online stores, sometimes in place of stationary stores that had lost their raison d'être as a result of the lockdown. Entrepreneurs quickly sensed in which sector of the market there was great potential and, as we can see from the example of devotionals, their intuition did not fail them, the expert estimates.