NEW YORK—With retailers mulling new or updated strategies for the second half of the year and beyond, they will need to gain greater understanding of which consumer behaviors have shifted permanently, which will revert to those of pre-pandemic times, and which will settle somewhere in the middle, according to a recent eMarketer analysis of shopping trends.

One segment of e-commerce that retailers can look further into is subscriptions—an especially helpful retail model for replenishment items (for example, consumer packaged goods or beauty and personal care items). Subscription ecommerce sales took off amid the crisis, with 41 percent growth, according to eMarketer’s estimates. And the research firm now expects that 3 percent of U.S. retail e-commerce sales will come from subscriptions in 2021, totaling $27.7 billion and up more than $10 billion from just two years ago.

This trend is reflected in the report “FutureBuy 2021,” a study from GfK, which found that 23 percent of respondents (a 7 percentage-point increase over 2020) said they are trying and are likely to continue shopping via subscription services. When broken down by generation, 34 percent of millennials (up by 16 percentage points) said they are likely to continue this shopping behavior. That was the highest percentage among all cohorts, followed by Gen Xers at 24 percent.

Additionally, GfK found that many of those who use a subscription shopping service are incentivized to engage with the brand through surveys and quizzes that match them with personalized products. Some 22 percent of all respondents, and 29 percent of millennials, said they are likely to continue engaging this way.

So, while subscription services may have gotten a pandemic boost, they have certainly found consumers to continue their ascent.