The Impact of COVID-19 Pandemic on E-commerce Firms: Data Mining for the Provinces in Indonesia

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought an impact on the global retail industry. Some studies have investigated e-commerce during the pandemic. However, most of them focused on consumer behavior in online shopping. This paper focuses on e-commerce firms, as an aggregate, among regions. This study departs from a question: what we can learn from the e-commerce firms in regions during the pandemic. The objectives of this study are: (1) to classify the intensity of e-commerce firms in a region and to specify the regional and e-commerce profiles, (2) to classify the intensity of pandemic impact on e-commerce firms and to specify the regional and e-commerce profiles, and (3) to specify the observed association between the characteristics of e-commerce, pandemic impact, and region profiles of e-commerce firms with high intensity and high pandemic impact. This quantitative and secondary research collected data from the Indonesian official statistics and Google mobility report. Data mining was implemented with the Knime Analytics Platform. The analysis classifies provinces with high and low e-commerce intensity and high and low pandemic impact and specifies the regional and e-commerce profiles regarding those classifications. This article contributes to the literature by presenting data mining using the official statistics among regions at a country level on e-commerce during the COVID-19 pandemic. More facilitation for regions with low e-commerce intensity is suggested. For example, local governments and marketplace companies could support firms entering online sales channels