During the COVID-19 pandemic, we at X-Byte started wondering how it might impact the crawled data as well as if that data might tell us anything useful about the pandemic as well as its effects.
Retail pricing intelligence is our main areas of interest. We scrape thousands of e-commerce websites daily for stock and price level information. Which insights could be buried in the data?
To search this, we recognized a bag of goods associated to pandemic preparation (e.g. Medications, Face Masks, etc.) and started tracking total individual items accessible online in the set, as well as average item pricing over time.
In the initial chart, you could see the general pricing (in blue), as well as total individual items (SKU’s, in retail dialect, in red) over the time for collections of US data resources. You could see there are many variations in total items supplied when new vendors arrive in the market having basic items. Because you could expect, the prices often move in opposite direction in dip around 5th April. Fundamental economics work however, the average pricing doesn’t drop as powerfully as you could expect. Primary demand is very strong. We aren’t searching at the stock levels, just a range of items available to buy as well as in stock. Variations in total items accessible might be because of unscrupulous vendors coming in the marketplace, or rebranding tedious supplies using COVID-19 associated keywords.
The power of primary demand is such that overall average pricing on a basket increased by more than 40% from 29th March (when we started tracking the series) ahead more than two months at 28th May. COVID-19 cases in the US started increasing in Mid-March, as well as using media coverage resulted that we might expect ‘normal’ basket pricing had already increased significantly from pre-COVID-19 base while we started tracking data.
This interactive map displays % increase in average item costs between 1st April as well as 1st June 2020. You could see that in the homogeneous market including the US, there is a significant state-by-state difference in price amount increases having prices over doubling in a few states (Alabama and Wyoming) however, showing very uncertain increases in others (like Minnesota). The increase does not look to associate with real experiential COVID-19 case levels.
This second chart indicates the overall pricing and 3 US states to compare. You could see the prices wobble, usually with various states that are not in sync. We expect to observe lower pricing in states with fewer active cases. However, that doesn’t look like the case because the US internal markets smooth out pricing variations in a few days with no systematic price variations.
In late May, something strange happened, causing the base prices to shoot up. It’s easy to tell. However, it looks as if the number of products accessible fell very quickly in recent days, with items at low pricing points becoming unavailable. Therefore, average item pricing shot to about $70 as merely high-priced items were left in the stock. We witness this effect mixed regionally, having a few states, including New York, getting small or no impacts and others showing pricing increasing without much discount in supply. We imagine this might be because of recent protests and civil disorders in the USA affecting different supply chains in exciting ways, taking definite goods out of supply in definite regions for some days and triggering a shorter price shock.
It reminds us how retail pricing intelligence data, united with stock level data and delivery waiting times, can provide a deeper insight into supply chain susceptibilities if you understand the correct queries to ask. Pricing Intelligence data could be utilized for objectives not directly associated with only setting competitive prices. Economists suggest that pricing is always a sign, and our data is enriched in those signals in case we understand where to search for them and can understand them correctly.
If you want to scrape COVID-19-associated data for research objectives, we can provide price intelligence services at affordable prices.
If you want pricing intelligence data and which data we might offer to assist in making business decisions, then download sample data or contact us.
