The coronavirus pandemic is proving to be a disaster for small and medium-sized enterprises across the world, after taken some form of measure to protect businesses from the effects of virus.
Predictions suggest that up to 7.5 million small businesses in America are at risk of shuttering permanently in the coming months unless they're able to find a way to recoup costs, and get back to some level of regular operation.
Facebook has published a new report to shed some more light on this, incorporating responses from over 86,000 people who own, manage or work for a small to medium-sized business. The data also includes 9,000 operators of “personal” businesses.
Facebook's report provides some scale as to how many businesses have actually been significantly impacted by the COVID-19 lockdowns, with a look at the percentage of SMBs in each sector that are currently unable to operate.
In fact, a significant increase in the traffic and demands are observed on most of the online shopping websites.
As per Facebook:
"According to the survey, 31% of small and medium-sized businesses have shut down [entirely] in the last three months. The situation is worse for personal business (52% of which report shutting down), hotels, cafes and restaurants (43%) and services like wellness, grooming, fitness or other professional services (41%)."