That's not exactly what they bet, because anyone knows that it would be dumb, including them. What you have to look at is e-commerce adoption as a % of retail.

That's not exactly what they bet, because anyone knows that it would be dumb, including them. What you have to look at is e-commerce adoption as a % of retail. This % is increasing every year since the end of the 90s. It was about 10% pre-pandemic. Of course they knew that the huge jump from COVID wouldn't be permanent. What they bet however is that once things re-open, SOME of that conversion to e-commerce would be permanent and that trend of % of retail on ecom would keep increasing at a faster pace than if COVID had not happened. Which wasn't the worse bet to take, you'd think that if people get used to a certain way of shopping and we invest in all this ecom infrastructure, some people would prefer the convenience of it in the long term. Tobi explained it well in his announcement for layoffs last year at Shopify (which came much earlier than other tech companies, likely because their revenue is much more strongly related to ecom revenue) https://news.shopify.com/changes-to-shopifys-team https://news.shopify.com/changes-to-shopifys-team