Big Apple and its Booming Online Businesses

 

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          Big Apple and its Boom­ing Online Businesses

By Ama­ree Love
Sep­tem­ber 17. 2022
Indi­go Baby Blog

Around the world, since the pan­dem­ic start­ed, many peo­ple have been at risk of los­ing their jobs and even quit­ting due to the stren­u­ous men­tal toll of being quarantined. 

It affect­ed fam­i­ly incomes as well as per­son­al enjoy­ment. How­ev­er, when indi­vid­u­als say online busi­ness is boom­ing they don’t know to what extent for those who recent­ly start­ed their busi­ness. Sales are high in New York City due to the lev­el of con­nec­tions peo­ple have in the city as well as social media con­nec­tions like Face­book, Twit­ter, and Instagram. 

In New York City, peo­ple have been build­ing online busi­ness­es from dif­fer­ent crafts they enjoy and cre­at­ing income from them. Monique Har­ris, a South­ern Con­necti­cut State Uni­ver­si­ty stu­dent in her sec­ond year, real­ized that tuition was get­ting too expen­sive for her par­ents to be able to pro­vide for her, and to help she need­ed to find a way to make an income to sup­port them finan­cial­ly reduc­ing the stress off of them. She decid­ed to com­bine two things she loved: bak­ing and mon­ey, said Harris. 

She start­ed her busi­ness ear­ly in 2019 and start­ed sell­ing cook­ies and cup­cakes and even­tu­al­ly advanced her busi­ness into mak­ing dec­o­rat­ed cakes for birth­day par­ties or tra­di­tion­al holidays.

She used Insta­gram to con­nect her fol­low­ers to her busi­ness and her close friends were her first orig­i­nal sup­port­ers. Due to her being from New York and grow­ing up in Queens, her busi­ness was not hard to access for those who knew her and lived blocks away, said Harris.

They began post­ing it on their Insta­gram sto­ries to shed light on Monique’s Treats. Har­ris uses Insta­gram to run her busi­ness smooth­ly. She has an online menu in her high­light reels – which are a fea­ture on Insta­gram – where cus­tomers can order what they want. Once that is estab­lished peo­ple will direct-mes­sage her and she will then send them an address to pick up their orders. She does not yet have a store­front but her next goal is look­ing toward mak­ing this busi­ness mobile as well as charg­ing for deliv­ery.  It is even­tu­al­ly becom­ing more suc­cess­ful and Har­ris now has a steady income as well as sav­ings to pay off her tuition lat­er on in life. 

The COVID-19 pan­dem­ic accel­er­at­ed e‑commerce growth years into the future. Oth­er pan­dem­ic-caused shifts also have boost­ed e‑commerce sales, such as infla­tion. Con­sumers paid $32 bil­lion more online for the same amount of goods dur­ing the past two years,  data from Adobe found.

March 2022 marks rough­ly two years since the coro­n­avirus pan­dem­ic spurred many U.S. con­sumers to go into lock­down mode as COVID-19 spread rapid­ly through­out the coun­try. Many con­sumers go online to buy their essen­tial items, Jes­si­ca Young, Dig­i­tal Com­merce Jour­nal­ist writes on digitalcommerce.org,  a web­site based on e‑commerce writing.

E‑commerce was grow­ing fast before COVID-19 hit. But the pan­dem­ic pushed even more U.S. con­sumers online and pushed more con­sumers to spend more online and more fre­quent­ly. Dig­i­tal Com­merce 360 esti­mates the pan­dem­ic con­tributed an extra $218.53 bil­lion to the e‑commerce bot­tom line over the past two years. In 2020, the coro­n­avirus added $102.08 bil­lion in U.S. e‑commerce, and it added $116.45 bil­lion in 2021, accord­ing to Dig­i­tal Com­merce 360 esti­mates. Young wrote her arti­cle on the sta­tis­tics of the increase in e‑commerce before and after the pandemic.

Accord­ing to Pew Research Center’s web­site, rough­ly six in 10 U.S. work­ers who say their jobs can main­ly be done from home (59%) are work­ing from home all or most of the time. The vast major­i­ty of these work­ers (83%) say they were work­ing from home even before the omi­cron vari­ant start­ed to spread in the Unit­ed States, the sur­vey suggests. 

How­ev­er, rough­ly one-in-five work­ers who are not work­ing exclu­sive­ly at home (22%) say their employ­er has required employ­ees to get a COVID-19 vac­cine, writes Kim Park­er, of the research cen­ter. Peo­ple have decid­ed to take the time and build their income on social media plat­forms cre­at­ing online busi­ness­es con­sid­er­ing how e‑commerce sales were going since peo­ple were not able to leave their homes dur­ing COVID-19. The Orga­ni­za­tion for Eco­nom­ic Co-oper­a­tion and Devel­op­ment which is a pol­i­cy response to coro­n­avirus believes that shifts brought about by COVID-19 such as e‑commerce sales ris­ing will be a long-term change to adapt to, writ­ten on their web­site oecd.org. 

Anto­nio Pauli­no Tay­lor was born and raised in New York and then lived in Mass­a­chu­setts in his teenage years, after build­ing the online busi­ness through his New York fol­low­ers – as his demo­graph­ics show on Insta­gram. The aspir­ing artist now resides in Los Angeles. 

He has an impres­sive amount of fol­low­ers: 102,000 and an annu­al 8,000 views for each video post. His stage name is Anto­nio Breez and peo­ple from around the world lis­ten to his music. His fol­low­ing began in New York City with some friends and sup­port­ers in resid­ing neigh­bor­hoods, and it then increased through Mass­a­chu­setts and beyond.

He recent­ly answered some ques­tions about why he start­ed a busi­ness sell­ing caps with his brand design on them. Tay­lor grad­u­at­ed from Cur­ry Col­lege in 2016 with a degree in graph­ic design. He used his skills to make the logo for Faith and Dreams by him­self, said Taylor.

Tay­lor already had the sup­port in New York and Mass­a­chu­setts to launch his busi­ness. Grow­ing up in New York gives a big advan­tage to those who have already mar­ket­ed them­selves. He cre­at­ed his web­site for Faith and Dreams using Instagram’s shop fea­ture as well as his col­lege degree in Graph­ic Design. Once the web­site was ready he made a quick post and his Faith and Dreams busi­ness page has almost 1,000 fol­low­ers now. 

Tay­lor said it hadn’t been a smooth ride, he used a Shopi­fy man­u­fac­tur­ing com­pa­ny to get an appro­pri­ate ship­ment of hats which costs more mon­ey than he has been mak­ing a prof­it. How­ev­er, con­sid­er­ing the online busi­ness is fair­ly new, prof­it change will come even­tu­al­ly and he is excit­ed about it.