Online retailer Industry West had some big technology plans in the pipeline for 2020, says Ian Leslie, chief marketing officer. With the coronavirus, most of those are now on hold, he says.

The modern furniture retailer, which launched in 2011 and sells both to consumers and businesses, has been growing its online sales 25-30% over the past few years. Within the past few months, it has shifted its project priorities.

“We were looking to transition to a new product listing page and personalization tool. We were also considering a new checkout provider to help with fraud and overall streamlining of the checkout process,” Leslie says. For its checkout, it was considering using payment processor and integrator Bolt to add Apple Pay as a payment option.

But the widespread coronavirus is hurting sales. Plus, the uncertainty surrounding the worldwide pandemic and the potential economic fallout from it has the retailer holding back on site upgrades that would require significant investment, Leslie says.

Our priorities at the beginning of the year were to focus on fine-tuning the front end of the site while also overhauling our checkout process,” Leslie says. “While we continue to take on front-end tasks as we can, we have had to delay the checkout discussion. We’re not able to iterate at the speed we would have prior to the current situation, but we can continue to make front-end tweaks of curation and messaging.”

The coronavirus pandemic has touched nearly every aspect of life in the United States and abroad, and online retailers of all stripes are impacted.

Indeed, merchants are treading cautiously…

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