U.S. E-Commerce Growth Surges for Many Merchants Amid the Covid-19 Pandemic

Newly analyzed data from Emarsys, a digital-marketing platform, shows that U.S. e-commerce spending continues to surge in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic, with at least a 57% growth in revenue and a 45% growth in orders in the past seven days.

The U.S. Northeast region shows a 57% growth rate in revenue for pure e-commerce merchants, which have no physical locations, across all merchant types. The Midwest rate is 66%, the West at 71%, and the South at 72%.

It’s another story for online sales for retailers with physical stores. Revenue for this category is down, ranging from a 16% decrease in the West, to drops of 20% in the Midwest, 22% in the South, and 27% in the Northeast.

Orders for retailers with online activity were down, too. These rates ranged from a 14% decrease in the West and South, to 21% in the Midwest and 26% in the Northeast. All of the data is updated daily.

Emarsys enlisted the data-visualization experts at GoodData to develop the new Covid-19 Commerce Insight Web tool to illustrate the impact of social distancing and other effects from the Covid 19 coronavirus infection on e-commerce sales. The tool draws on anonymous data from more than a billion engagements and 400 million transactions in 120 nations. It provides data on revenue and orders for e-commerce merchants that only sell online and the online component of other retailers.

It also breaks down the data by merchant sector: fashion and accessories, home and leisure, and sports and hobbies, in addition to an overall view.

“Key insights from the new platform include how the pandemic is affecting the number of online consumer transactions, order numbers, the average order value, types of items purchased and more—in any industry and region in the world—in context of the extraordinary measures taken by governments globally,” Emarsys said in a statement. “Moreover, the platform acts as a crowdsourcing community hub for business owners, economists, academics, and policymakers to publish their own advice and insights to help others.”

The Covid-19 Commerce Insight tool also displays year-over-year trends for the past 14 days and since January by global region and by country. 

“This pandemic is having an unprecedented effect on the global economy and consumer spending,” said Hagai Hartman, founder and chief innovation officer at Emarsys. “And in the absence of hard data about consumer spending and confidence, associated fear and uncertainty is self-perpetuating. We’ve launched CCinsight with the goal of putting up-to-date consumer data in the hands of business owners, economists and policymakers to help them by giving them the actionable insight they need to navigate this economic crisis.”