Impact of Coronavirus on eCommerce: The Mother’s Day Edition (Update 10)
With the traditional Mother’s Day brunch and other celebratory outings out of the equation this year, many have turned to digital to source gifts for their mom(s), who may well be in need of some extra appreciation these days! Jewelry and beauty brands are decking out their homepages with special Mother’s Day gift guides and promotions (shoutout to Aesop’s three key mom lessons homepage banner), and the internet is blooming with lists of small businesses you can support with your Mom-Day purchases right now.
As we do every week, we’ve analyzed billions of online sessions across 900 websites to understand gifting behaviors in particular, and to see what trends are unfolding across all industries this week.
To understand the impact of the crisis on traffic, transactions, pageviews, and more, we’ve compared data from the past week to the period immediately preceding the global reporting of the outbreak (or, the first 6 weeks of the year, which we call the reference period).
Here’s what we surfaced this past week:
Mother’s Day Spending Drives Transactions in Beauty, Jewelry and Luxury Sectors
According to an NRF survey, consumers in the US are slated to spend a record $26.7B on gifts for their mom(s) this year, with the average Mother’s Day budget nearing $205. The study, which is based on a survey of 8,000+ adult consumers, also singles out jewelry as the top gifting category.
This explains the +5% increase in visits to jewelry sites this past week in the US, and the 19% boost in the volume of transactions. The luxury sector appears to have also benefited from the collective Mother’s Day gifting enthusiasm, recording +6% more traffic than in the previous week and a massive +33% surge in the number of transactions in the US.
And judging by the +12% jump in US traffic to beauty sites, paired with an +11% increase in purchases, the country’s tired, homeschooling moms could well be in for some well-deserved self-care next weekend.
In fact the beauty sector has seen steady growth since early April, with +33% more global digital traffic today than since mid-February. Transactions in the sector have more than doubled over the past two months, while engagement (time spent per session) has remained steady.
Luxury Market Continues Digital Recovery
After a significant drop in February and March, luxury site traffic has been climbing back up for the past five weeks, and is now at -14% pre-Covid19 levels. After initially dropping by -40% in March, transactions have made a strong recovery and the latest surge has brought them to +36% pre-Coronavirus levels.
In terms of transactions, the hard luxury sector is faring better than soft luxury (+150% and +25% respectively), although their traffic patterns are comparable. High end luxury has also shown more resilience when it comes to purchases (+80% from pre-Covid19), while affordable luxury has only just climbed back up to pre-Covid19 levels.
Despite recent growth, this remains a modest performance when you compare luxury to adjacent sectors such as fashion and cosmetics, where digital is compensating more for the pausing of brick-and-mortar commerce.
Steady Growth Overall As Digital Continues To Be The Only Store
Traffic overall continues to grow steadily (if slowly), with a +2.5% increase compared to +2% the previous week, and +7% the week before that. This steady growth over the past two months has resulted in a +29% increase in the number of site visits since before lockdown.
The volume of global cross-industry transactions has grown by +48% since the first quarantine orders in the West. After a bit of a pause the previous week, transactions were up again by +3.6% the week beginning 4/27.
And after an initial period of rapid growth, the conversion rate has now stabilized at around +15-20% above normal, pre-Covid19 levels.
If you want to see KPIs for your industry, be sure to check out our Covid-19 eCommerce Impact Data Hub. It’s updated every Monday with the freshest behavioral data across all sectors.
