Consumer Behaviour Shifts Post-2020

The consumer behaviour shifts of 2020 and 2021 were, in most retail categories, part reality and part narrative overreach. Analysts wrote about “the acceleration” of digital adoption as if e-commerce had made a decade of progress in a year, and then quietly revised their framing when 2022 showed most of the gains reverting toward trend. In the adult retail category, however, the pattern was genuinely different. The shifts of 2020 were larger than the analyst class expected, persisted longer than the analyst class expected, and have now, three years on, settled into a durable rearrangement of how the category trades. That durability is worth writing down carefully, because it changes the assumptions any operator should carry into 2024.

The single most important post-2020 shift was the collapse of the friction — much of it social rather than commercial — that had kept a meaningful share of potential category buyers from ever transacting. Home delivery, contactless payments and the collapse of the “browsing in person” default meant that a first purchase became substantially easier for a large cohort of consumers who had previously either not bought at all or bought infrequently and reluctantly.

The e-commerce acceleration was real, and it stuck

Category e-commerce penetration in Europe moved from roughly 45 percent in 2019 to about 60 percent by the end of 2020. In most retail categories the equivalent surge partially reversed by 2022. In this category it did not. By late 2023 online share sits at roughly 58 to 62 percent across Western Europe and continues to grind higher year on year at 150 to 250 basis points. The 2020 lift, in other words, was not a spike. It was a level shift.

What changed structurally was the customer base rather than the shopping behaviour of the existing customer base. The pandemic period brought roughly 15 to 20 percent more distinct buyers into the category, and those buyers, having transacted once, kept transacting. Repeat rates on the 2020 cohort have held up well through 2023, and their basket composition has broadened toward wellness and premium SKUs at a rate that outpaces the pre-pandemic cohort. A specijalizovana prodavnica that captured meaningful share of those first-time buyers in 2020 is, three years later, running a materially larger repeat base than it otherwise would.

Discretion demand has hardened, not softened

The other durable shift is around discretion. The 2020 experience — being at home, receiving deliveries, having household members present — sharpened consumer expectations around packaging, billing descriptors and delivery experience in a way that has not relaxed as normal life resumed. If anything the standard has risen. Plain outer packaging is now the base expectation rather than a differentiator, unmarked billing descriptors are non-negotiable, and any operator whose carrier scan shows a branded shipping label loses a meaningful share of would-be repeat purchases.

That standard has done real competitive work. The operators who had already built proper diskretna dostava infrastructure before 2020 have kept and grown their share. Those who tried to retrofit it under time pressure through 2020 and 2021 mostly did a passable job, but the customers who experienced a discretion failure early in that period largely defected and did not return. A pouzdan trgovac reputation is difficult to build and easy to lose in this category, and the pandemic period was a natural test that separated the operators quite clearly.

Wellness took a permanent share of the basket

The third shift is compositional. Wellness SKUs — lubricants, intimate cosmetics, supplements, care products — grew from roughly 25 percent of category spend in 2019 to close to a third by 2022, and have held that share into 2023. That share expansion came partly from new buyers whose first basket was wellness-heavy and partly from existing buyers who added wellness items to baskets that had previously been more narrowly toy-focused.

The commercial implication is that the wellness aisle is no longer a supporting category. It is a primary driver of both new-buyer acquisition and repeat-basket expansion, and it is where the operational excellence of a retailer shows up most clearly. A serious wellness and cosmetics range, properly merchandised and honestly described, is now table stakes rather than a nice-to-have. Any retailer whose category page for wellness looks like an afterthought is leaving material revenue on the table.

The generational picture is more nuanced than the headlines suggest

Trade press likes to write about the post-2020 story as a young-consumer story. The data is more nuanced. Yes, younger consumers moved online quickly and stayed there. But the more consequential behavioural shift was in the 35-to-55 cohort — the group that had historically been the least comfortable in physical retail environments and the least likely to browse. That cohort’s category penetration expanded meaningfully through 2020 and 2021 and has held, and their basket sizes, repeat rates and premium-mix skew now make them the most valuable customer segment for most operators.

The younger cohort matters for growth. The middle cohort matters for margin. Operators like eroticshop.me that read that distinction correctly are running merchandising and communication strategies that address both without conflating them.

What we now know that we did not know in 2020

We now know, three years on, that the pandemic-era shifts in this category were not a temporary anomaly. They were a structural rearrangement of category adoption, channel mix and consumer expectations that has proved durable across an economic cycle. The category e-commerce share is roughly ten percentage points higher than the pre-2020 trend line, the customer base is roughly a fifth larger, and the wellness segment has stabilised at a meaningfully higher share of basket than it held before.

Anyone building a five-year plan for the category should build it on those levels, not on the 2019 baseline. The retailers who have already done that — the professionalised D2C operators of which https://eroticshop.me/ is a representative example — are running with strategic assumptions that fit the market as it actually is rather than as it was. That is a competitive advantage that compounds.