Value (verhoef et al., 2021 ). in the fashion industry, gaud- enzi et al. ( ) found that e-commerce offers a pathway for firms to evolve in two directions. in the first path, they contend that it bestows resources in the form of a network structure in the supply chain and a service architecture for product variation and delivery responsiveness. secondly, they reasoned that e-commerce enables the development of capabilities in relationship governance, managing informa- tion asymmetry, logistical operations and virtual customer relationship management. in theory, these resources and capabilities typify some of the characteristics of resilience needed by firms to navigate the covid-19 challenges in terms of agility and elasticity (rapaccini et al., 2020 ). there- fore, with digitalisation in mind, there is a current yearning to better understand the mechanism by which e-commerce supports resilience and subsequent firm performance during crisis. the interest in firm resilience among scholars and the wider public is cyclical and typically amplified by stints of economic hardship (burger et al., 2017 ; haddoud et al., 2022 ). in periods like the covid-19 episode, the endeavour to uncover the ingredients for resilience is only eclipsed by attempts to define the attribute in terms that are more con- ceptually and empirically definitive. current understanding of resilience is loose possibly because of multidisciplinary