Tracking Commerce Through the Pandemic: Daily Data Analytics Spots Trends

The Covid-19 pandemic has driven huge changes in our lives, workplaces and economies, and GoodData is doing its part to help make sense of it all.

In March, in partnership with Emarsys, we launched the Covid-19 Commerce Insight tracker to track real-time consumer spending online around the world in key sectors.

Since then, the tracker has informed media coverage in numerous outlets, including Women’s Wear Daily, one of the largest and most credible retail trade publications, and Vogue Business regarding the impact of markdowns in online fashion sales. Retail Times picked up early signs of a “road to recovery” for the Italian fashion industry, one of the earliest to be hit, and TotalRetail posted “some good news'' given increased online sales.

The tracker is one of the first to bring real-time insight to economic patterns that typically take weeks or months to bubble up through more official channels, such as those tracked by the U.S. Department of Commerce.

But companies facing a sudden loss of consumer traffic, or other disasters, cannot wait months to pivot. They need insight right away to help them make informed changes to operations, staffing, even sourcing, so they can better manage through the crisis.

The information the tracker presents — revenue and orders in on-line commerce overall and in the home and leisure, sport and hobbies and fashion and accessories sectors — impact hundreds of thousands of companies. The tracker includes 400 million consumer transactions in more than 120 countries.

As Emarsys, the only omni-channel customer engagement platform build to accelerate business outcomes, noted in its recent blog, “economic, governmental, and business decisions have always been stronger when they’re based on

data, and now we need data more than ever to navigate tough times and to make the toughest of decisions.”

Already, the tracker is revealing surprises, as noted in Women’s Wear Daily, that consumers haven’t completely just shut their wallets but are “splurging” online.

Tracking economic spending across the globe is no small task, but with today’s technology, it can be done with more speed and precision than ever before. The tracker’s data is real-time, and it’s easily accessible with an interactive map.

That kind of ease with data analytics is exactly what all companies need to help them better run their own operations, pandemic or no pandemic.

Here at GoodData, we’re working toward the vision of “Analytics Everywhere.” The Covid-19 tracker shows that’s possible and that so is Analytics Everywhere — no matter what the circumstances.

We’re pleased to be part of the massive effort that’s unfolding to educate and empower companies large and small, and the customers they serve.

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