Conversation

3/ Last week I pointed out a category divergence: animals & pet supplies exploding, apparel & accessories collapsing. That divergence still exists, but has come back a lot from the extremes seen 2 weeks ago; perhaps an early sign of a return to normalcy?
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4/ Two other major e-commerce categories doing well are Electronics (+40% YOY) and Home & Garden (+31% YOY). This is almost certainly driven by the replacement of brick-and-mortar sales by online sales.
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5/ Health & Beauty shows a lot of volatility week to week. We suspect sales of many health products have declined recently due to a lack of inventory, which in turn was perhaps driven by heavy purchasing in early March.
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I am guessing health and beauty includes soap and sanitizer? That category could clear use some unbundling into pandemic relevant vs. pandemic irrelevant products. I doubt there's a spike in lipstick sales
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There are a lot of forces pulling this category in different directions: bundling of lipstick and sanitizer is one. Inventories is another. Price dynamics (elasticity, gouging, sales) is a third.
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Going more granular reveals some non-obvious patterns -- for example lipstick sales are in fact actually pretty strong, *relatively speaking*. (A lot depends on where you benchmark). That said, the more granular you go, the more vulnerable you are to small-sample bias.