Consumer goods during covid-19

Suddenly popular products

These are the product types that received the sharpest increase in attention from Swedish consumers when the pandemic first hit them (January 31 - April 2, 2020). The larger the text size, the steeper the increase. The measure considers only products that are among the 1000 most popular on April 2. The data is from a price comparison website with more than half a million unique Swedish users per week. The "popularity" is the user traffic rank. The shown names are the names of product categories to which the products of sharpest popularity increase belong.

While there are some obviously season dependent products (e.g. Grill and Running shoes), people seem to increasingly search for products that help them

1. Work remotely (Webcam, Computer screen, Tablet etc.)

2. Entertain themselves at home (PlayStation 4 games, Game console, PC games etc.)

3. Stay healthy (Thermometer, Painkillers, Hand sanitizer etc.)

stay clean and healthy

The figure above shows the average rank for the three most popular products in each product category each day. Low rank means relatively high user traffic volume. The thermometers where already somewhat popular in January, but the rest where not. Usually, people don't need a price comparison website for buying painkillers. During the beginning of March, however, that rapidly change. Most likely, as the pharmacy shelves were suddenly empty, people went online not to find the lowest price, but to find it at all. Hand sanitizers (handsprit), also sold out quickly in regular stores and even hospitals found themselves in shortage of this suddenly scarce good. Face masks (munskydd) did not even exist as a product category on the price comparison website until mid February.

Return of the webcam

Webcams were cool gadgets back in the 90's and perhaps even early 00's. After computer producers started to build in webcameras in laptops, stand-alone webcams were out of the spotlight. But only until very recently.

This figure illustrates three pieces of information over time for the five webcams that are the most popular webcams at the beginning of March. The average user traffic rank is as in the previous figure. User traffic was relatively low in the beginning of the year. There were about 5000 other products that users where more interested in. Average prices where fairly stable until mid March. The number of retailers that offer these webcams dipped in the beginning of February, but recovered to the starting level in the beginning of March. Then something happened.

Ten days into March, all of these time series change abruptly. The user traffic increases vastly, until these webcams are among the most popular on the website. Prices steadily increase by more than 40% on average at the beginning of April. The number of retailers that offers the products declines by 40% on average. This figure actually underestimates the size of the decline in number of retailers, because it does not account for the fact that most retailers that still list the products are out of stock.

These illustrations are part of my contribution to a project at the Riksbank that gathers data and insights on a wide range of economic activities in Sweden during the COVID-19 pandemic. The project is led by Isaiah Hull. See more stats here: https://c19impact.com/public