By Ryan Williams,
With yet another month of social distancing behind us, we took another look at the performance of online retail during the coronavirus pandemic.
Following up on a prior blog, where we focused on the CPG/Grocery, Home Furnishings, Consumer Electronics, and Events & Tickets categories, we are seeing that domains in the Events & Tickets category continue to struggle, seeing visitation at levels 75 percent below numbers we saw in February 2020. Visits to domains in the Home Furnishings category (which includes domains like HomeDepot.com and Lowes.com), were up more than 90 percent during the week of April 27, 2020 vs. the week of February 3, 2020, as people adhering to stay home guidelines likely continue to invest in home improvements.
Weekly Visitation to Retail Categories
Before the pandemic really took hold in the US, early March 2020 visitation to top retail domains looked relatively similar to early February 2020. However, by late March 2020, visitation trends shifted dramatically. Even as of early May 2020, we’re still a long way from what might have once been considered normal.
Visits to Top Retail Domains
A view into the rankings of the top 20 retail domains shows the shakeup we’ve witnessed since early February 2020. Below, we’ve ranked the top 20 retail domains by weekly visits as of the week of April 27, 2020 and have highlighted the change in rank for each domain since the week of February 3, 2020. Other than the top 3 sites, all other top 20 domains have seen a change in rank over the past 12 weeks. Domains like Costco, Overstock, Nordstrom and Michaels have performed well during the pandemic while department stores like Kohl’s and Macy’s as well as Walgreens have fallen in the rankings.
Top 20 Retail Domains
Overall, consumer spending in online retail across desktop and mobile was up 13 percent in March 2020 vs. March 2019 but, like with visitation, this varies greatly by category. The CPG/Grocery category has seen an explosion in spending as consumers flock to online food delivery services like Instacart and Doordash. Meanwhile, consumer spending on Events & Tickets was down over 50 percent year over year. Based on visitation trends, Comscore has seen so far for April 2020, spending could fall even further for the Tickets category.
Ryan Williams is Sr. Director, Client Insights of Comscore.
Stephanie Parkinson, Comscore’s Senior Director, Client Insights, is also doing a series of insights that show a Canadian digital perspective on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on consumer behavior. Her ongoing posts provide an update as to how Canadians continue to engage with online content as of the week of May 4th–10th, 2020. Now entering the third month of the pandemic, Canadians have begun to show renewed interest in a few hard-hit categories, continue to find ways to connect with one another and are shifting their buying habits through digital media.
Highlights Include:
• Digital consumption remains high, but has seen some slight downturns in consumption in recent weeks
• There is renewed interest in real estate and automotive content
• There continues to be growth in retail, especially in particular categories such as sports/outdoors and home furnishings.
• News and government sites appear to have reached a peak in visitation and engagement
• Canadians continue to find ways to connect and celebrate while social distancing
For more detail please visit her work at www.comscore.com
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