The DataWeave Blog

Tag: Sale Event Reports

Our proprietary data aggregation and analysis platform affords us the ability to capture unique insights on the pricing and product strategies of retailers and consumers brands during sale events. View our latest reports on sale events from around the world.

Who Won Black Friday’s Electronics Price War?

Electronics have never been hotter.

This year’s COVID-19 pandemic created a seismic shift towards tech, directly affecting retailers’ Black Friday and Cyber Monday pricing strategies for electronics. Prime Day 2020’s new fall date also inevitably influenced pricing and purchasing patterns. If consumers pampered themselves with a 75-inch TV in October, what are the odds they’re in the market for another big-screen TV in late November?

Consumer electronics are perennial holiday bestsellers because they make gift-giving easy, whether we buy them for others or for personal indulgence. Continuous innovation also means a comparatively shorter product lifecycle, making electronics an exciting, progressive retail category.

To determine which retailers’ pricing strategies offered the most generous discounts on electronic products, we examined electronics pricing at Amazon, Best Buy, Overstock, Target and Walmart. We compared during the pre-sale period (November 24-26) to the holiday sales period (Black Friday on November 27 through Cyber Monday on November 30) for a glimpse of retailers’ pricing strategies to stay competitive in 2020.

For competitive pricing insights, we tracked three scenarios before and during 2020’s traditional holiday sales season: whether prices decreased, increased or remained the same. Most strikingly, the overwhelming majority of electronics products (89.8%) maintained the same prices during the pre-sale and sales periods. For instance, Target kept a whopping 98.0% of its electronics prices the same during the period.

Amazon had the greatest proportion of electronics products that offered a price decrease (11.7%), particularly on laptops, mobiles and wearable technology. These results also suggest Amazon wants to reach more consumers by making more electronics affordable with discounts. Target offered the lowest proportion of electronics with price decreases (2.5%).

Overstock had the greatest proportion of electronics products that offered a price increase (10.7%) with 30.3% of TVs increasing in price. Best Buy offered the lowest proportion of electronics with price increases (1.2%).

Among electronics products with price decreases on Black Friday, Best Buy offered the highest average discount (16.6%) and Amazon offered the lowest (10.2%). Among all the retailers, the types of electronics with the highest average discount included tablets, headphones, laptops and TVs.

Among electronics products with price increases on Black Friday, Best Buy had the highest average price hike (30.2%) and Amazon offered the lowest (9.8%). That said, Best Buy increased the price of one laptop by 73.1% whereas Amazon increased the price of 44 laptops by an average of 4.2%.

These findings show that Best Buy aggressively protected its market share in this competitive category by offering the most generous discounts.

Black Friday vs. Cyber Monday

Without exception, the retailers offered more additional discounts across the electronics category on Cyber Monday than on Black Friday. Retailers may have wanted to clear out their inventory to make room for new, innovative products in their assortments.

Amazon had the greatest proportion of electronics with additional discounts on Cyber Monday (15.7%, which is more than double the 7.3% each for Overstock and Target). Amazon’s additional discounts focused on mobiles, laptops and wearable technology.

Overall, the greatest proportion of additional discounts on electronics on Cyber Monday focused on laptops, desktops and USB flash drives.

While most retailers offered deeper discounts on electronics on Cyber Monday than Black Friday, Overstock was the sole exception.

On Cyber Monday, Target offered the most generous average additional discounts (19.6% vs. 10.2% for Amazon); however, Target’s discounts applied to 260 electronics products compared to 924 for Amazon.

Overall, the types of electronics with the deepest discounts on Cyber Monday on electronics were USB flash drives, tablets and headphones.

Additional discounts across products by “premiumness” level

When we examine electronics’ additional discounts according to the products’ premium level, several patterns stand out.

Most apparent is that every retailer offered a higher proportion of additional discounts on Cyber Monday compared to Black Friday, ranging from 15.9% for Amazon to 6.4% for Best Buy.

With only one exception, Amazon offered the greatest proportion of additional discounts across all premium levels. Only Target offered a slightly higher proportion among low premium electronics (11.9% vs. 11.3% for Amazon). This approach could help Amazon make more electronics products more affordable to more consumers and boost its reach in this competitive category.

Among electronic items at the high premium level, Amazon was most aggressive in allocating additional discounts (21.0% vs. 5.4% for Target), which could help the e-commerce giant earn top-of-mind status among affluent shoppers in the market for big-ticket electronics.

Most retailers (Amazon, Best Buy and Walmart) offered deeper discounts on Cyber Monday than Black Friday. By contrast, Overstock and Target were more generous on Black Friday.

Interestingly, Target’s average additional discount on Cyber Monday (18.8%) was still more generous than those of the other retailers.

Among moderately premium items, Target’s average additional discount was 22.3%, more than double Amazon’s 10.3%. Target may have tried to make mid-market electronics more affordable to its core audience of value-seeking shoppers.

Additional discounts across products by “popularity” level

A review of retailers’ additional discounts by electronics’ popularity level reveals that most retailers allocated a bigger proportion of discounts on Cyber Monday than on Black Friday. Overstock was the exception. Again, clearing out 2020 inventory before year-end likely influenced retailers’ pricing strategies.

Overall, on Cyber Monday retailers showed a direct relationship between additional discounts and electronics’ popularity levels. For instance, Amazon offered additional discounts on 21.7% of highly popular electronics and 15.3% on moderately popular electronics. Since Amazon strives to be “The Everything Store,” it makes sense to make more products more appealing and affordable to more consumers. Meanwhile, Target offered nearly double the proportion of additional discounts of less popular electronics than discount rival Walmart (12.5% vs. 6.7%) to tempt value-seekers with deals.

Most retailers (Amazon, Best Buy, Target and Walmart) offered deeper discounts on Cyber Monday than Black Friday. Overstock was more generous on Black Friday.

On Cyber Monday, Target’s average additional discount (21.8%) was the most generous of all the retailers, nearly double that of Amazon (11.1%). However, Target’s discounts applied to 259 electronics products. vs. 903 for Amazon.

Both Amazon and Overstock gave their most generous discounts to less-popular electronics, possibly to clear out their inventory to make room for more popular or higher-margin items.

Black Friday & Cyber Monday 2020 Electronics Pricing Strategies

This year, the pandemic jolted consumers to focus on digital technology to stay connected to work, school and retail, which heightened demand for electronics.

In response, retailers’ 2020 pricing strategies for Black Friday and Cyber Monday suggest a desire to extend their reach beyond their core audience to maximize their brand appeal and steal rivals’ market share.

The Cyber Monday findings, in particular, suggest retailers decluttered their assortments to make space for the latest and highest-margin tech gadgets in time for Christmas.

Click here for more Black Friday and Cyber Monday 2020 analysis for greater clarity on the evolving pricing positions of retail rivals across top e-commerce categories.

December 11, 2020
Black Friday Furniture Prices Inspire Home Makeovers

As most of us stay home for the holidays this year, retailers hope we’ll invest in our nest.

The global pandemic ignited sales in the red-hot home furniture category, as our domestic comfort, functionality and aesthetics suddenly became urgent priorities in 2020. Now we’re investing more in domestic leisure, organizing and redecorating as our consumption habits shift.

That’s why we wanted to know how retailers adapted their Black Friday and Cyber Monday furniture pricing strategies to meet consumers’ needs. For instance, did retailers give the best deals on low-commitment furniture like area rugs or on big-ticket items like dining room sets?

To pinpoint which retailers offered the greatest proportion of discounts and the deepest discounts, we reviewed furniture at Amazon, Home Depot, JC Penney, Overstock, Target, Walmart and Wayfair. We compared the pre-sale period (November 24-26) to the holiday sales period (Black Friday on November 27 through Cyber Monday on November 30) to monitor retailers’ furniture pricing moves.

Top product types by additional discount

To review retailers’ holiday pricing strategies in the furniture category, we tracked three scenarios: whether prices decreased, increased or remained the same during the last week of November 2020.

The proportion of furniture items that maintained the same prices during the pre-sale and sales periods ranged widely, from 91.6% for Home Depot to only 22.6% for Wayfair.

That’s because Wayfair had by far the highest proportion of furniture with a price decrease (77.2% on 4254 products vs. 7.1% on 342 products for Home Depot). Since Wayfair specializes in home décor, it makes sense for the retailer to aggressively distribute discounts across its furniture assortment.

Among all retailers, the top types of furniture with discounts included bookcases, entertainment units, sofas and storage and cabinets. These findings suggest we are investing in domestic leisure, relaxation and organization.

On Black Friday, JC Penney offered the most generous average discount (21.3% vs. 4.6% for Wayfair). This means that although Wayfair spread discounts across its furniture subcategories, the actual discounts were lower than rivals’.

Types of furniture with the highest average discount on Black Friday at JC Penney included storage and cabinets, bookcases and rugs. These products tend to be affordable additions to our homes compared to bigger investments like a dining room set.

Black Friday Vs. Cyber Monday

On Cyber Monday, Target offered additional discounts on the greatest proportion of furniture (27.4% vs. 7.8% for JC Penney). These findings suggest Target really wants to be a convenient option for shoppers, including their home furnishing needs.

Among all retailers, the top types of discounted furniture included rugs, beds and entertainment units.

Most retailers offered deeper additional discounts on furniture on Cyber Monday than Black Friday, possibly to maximize sales before the end of the year. Cyber Monday discounts for furniture ranged from 20.9% for JC Penney to 4.9% for Wayfair. Among all retailers, the top types of furniture that received discounts on Cyber Monday were rugs, storage and cabinets and dining table sets, which show that redecorating and organizing were in style this holiday season.

Additional discounts across product “premiumness” levels

Nearly all retailers had a higher proportion of furniture with additional discounts on Cyber Monday than on Black Friday. Wayfair had the highest proportion (79.2% for both Cyber Monday and Black Friday vs. 9.3 for Home Depot). Wayfair’s use of discounts across all premium levels on both major sales days shows the retailer wants to extend its brand reach, own this category and earn top-of-mind status across diverse furniture shoppers at all price points.

Only JC Penney had a higher percentage of furniture with additional discounts on Black Friday.

Every retailer offered deeper discounts on Cyber Monday than Black Friday, likely to clear out 2020 merchandise.

On Cyber Monday, JC Penney offered the most generous furniture discounts, with an average additional discount of 38.0%, which ranged from 35.1% at the low premium level to 40.9% at the moderately premium level. Aggressive discounts could set JC Penney apart among department stores and attract more low- to mid-market consumers with tempting furniture deals.

Also, most retailers gave the deepest discounts on furniture at the high premium level, which can help to make upscale items accessible and affordable to a greater number of consumers.

Additional discounts across product “popularity” levels

Almost all retailers offered a greater proportion of additional furniture discounts on Cyber Monday than on Black Friday, ranging from 67.6% for Wayfair to 7.8% for Home Depot.

Across all levels of popularity for furniture, Wayfair dominated with discounts on the most diverse array of products to give more furniture shoppers an opportunity to save money.

Meanwhile, Amazon and JC Penney offered the greatest proportion of discounts at the low level of popularity, possibly to declutter their furniture assortment to make room for in-demand products.

Nearly every retailer offered deeper discounts on furniture on Cyber Monday than on Black Friday, with JC Penney being the most generous (39.1% vs. 5.3% for Wayfair).

Home Depot and Wayfair prioritized discounts among less popular furniture, likely to clear them out and make more room in their assortments for items people really want.

Amazon and Walmart gave deeper discounts on highly popular furniture to battle it out over bestsellers.

Holiday Furniture Pricing Inspires Us to Reimagine Our Space

This year, more consumers decluttered their homes and more retailers decluttered their furniture assortment by clearing out 2020 merchandise with desirable deals on Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

The findings of this pricing analysis hint at retailers’ competitive positioning. To own the furniture category, Wayfair aggressively allocated discounts across its assortment even if rivals gave deeper discounts. Target’s deep discounts helped to position the chain as a convenient option for shoppers’ cross-category needs, including furniture. JC Penney’s astonishingly deep discounts on Black Friday and Cyber Monday could help to liquidate inventory, whereas Amazon and Walmart battled over bestsellers.

Click here for more Black Friday and Cyber Monday analysis to learn about retailers’ holiday pricing strategies during 2020’s e-commerce boom.

December 11, 2020
Black Friday Prices Wowed Fashionistas

Retailers really wanted to dress us up this holiday season.

This year’s Black Friday and Cyber Monday fashion pricing trends reflect how retailers have responded to the pandemic’s influence on apparel shopping to boost their resilience and competitiveness.

For instance, since most consumers now cocoon at home, few of us are likely to splurge on fancy gowns or suits as holiday gifts for ourselves or others. That’s why we wanted to know which retailers doubled down on Black Friday fashion discounts and which ones used Cyber Monday discounts to make room for in-demand merchandise.

To calculate which retailers’ prices offered the greatest proportion of discounts and the deepest discounts, we analyzed men’s and women’s fashions at Amazon, Bloomingdale’s, JC Penney, Macy’s, Neiman Marcus, Overstock, Nordstrom, Target and Walmart. We compared the pre-sale period (November 24-26) to the holiday sales period (Black Friday on November 27 through Cyber Monday on November 30) to gain insights into retailers’ pricing strategies in fashion.

Top product types by additional discounts- Men’s fashion

To review retailers’ holiday pricing strategies, we tracked three scenarios: whether prices decreased, increased or remained the same during the last week of November 2020.

The overall proportion of men’s fashion items that maintained the same prices during the pre-sale and sales periods was 88.6%, ranging from 99.5% for JC Penney to 75.0% for Neiman Marcus.

Neiman Marcus had the highest proportion of men’s fashions with a price decrease (25.0% vs. 1.4% for JC Penney). Top types of men’s fashions that had discounts were formal shoes, jackets and coats, and sports shoes. These findings seem to reflect how we rarely go out during the pandemic yet we’re exercising more.

In addition, Amazon and Walmart were most active in offering discounts across all men’s fashion subcategories with Amazon offering more than double Walmart’s percentage of products discounted (15.9% vs. 7.1%).

On Black Friday, JC Penney offered the most generous average discounts (35.6% vs. 9.4% for Overstock). While that contrast seems dramatic, it’s important to note JC Penney’s discounts applied to only 8 products compared to 929 for Overstock.

Men’s fashions with the highest average discount on Black Friday included formal shoes, jackets and coats and jeans.

Top product types by additional discounts- Women’s fashion

For women’s fashions we also tracked whether prices decreased, increased or remained the same during the last week of November 2020. The vast majority of women’s fashions (89.3%) maintained the same prices during the pre-sale and sales periods. A whopping 99.3% of Target’s women’s fashion prices stayed the same.

Neiman Marcus had the highest proportion of women’s fashions with a price decrease (33.4%), particularly on casual shoes, t-shirts and lingerie. JC Penney and Target offered the lowest proportion of price decreases on women’s fashions (1.9%).

Similar to men’s fashions, Amazon and Walmart offered price discounts across all the women’s fashion subcategories with Amazon offering a higher proportion of products with discounts. (10.7% vs. 7.7% for Walmart)

On Black Friday, JC Penney offered the most generous average discounts (45.0% vs. 12.2% for Overstock) yet JC Penney’s discounts applied to only 28 products compared to 1952 for Overstock.

The types of women’s fashions with the highest average discount on Black Friday included tops, casual shoes and handbags. Perhaps women pampered themselves with a new purse and new tops to look chic on Zoom calls.

Black Friday Vs Cyber Monday

During this year’s holiday sales events, almost all retailers offered more additional discounts on men’s and women’s fashion on Cyber Monday than on Black Friday, possibly to sell off seasonal inventory before year-end. Nordstrom was the only exception, offering more discounts on Black Friday.

On Cyber Monday, Target offered additional discounts on the greatest proportion of men’s fashions (63.3% vs. 10.6% for Walmart). Top types of men’s fashions with discounts included underwear, jeans, jackets and coats.

Similarly, Target offered additional discounts on the greatest proportion of women’s fashions on Cyber Monday (79.4% vs. 3.2% for JC Penney). The most common types of discounted women’s fashions were dresses and jumpsuits, t-shirts and casual shoes.

These findings suggest Target is aggressively pursuing value shoppers and positioning the chain as a convenient source for all the whole family’s apparel needs.

Most retailers (Amazon, Nordstrom, Overstock, Target and Walmart) offered deeper additional discounts on men’s fashions on Cyber Monday than Black Friday, possibly to maximize year-end sales and clear out seasonal inventory. Cyber Monday discounts for men’s fashions ranged from 29.8% for Nordstrom to 11.0% for Overstock. Top types of men’s fashions that received Cyber Monday discounts included jackets and coats, formal shoes, sunglasses and t-shirts, which reflect how men are going out less.

Conversely, most retailers (JC Penney, Macy’s, Neiman Marcus, Nordstrom and Walmart) offered deeper additional discounts on women’s fashions on Black Friday than Cyber Monday, possibly to entice women to get a jumpstart on the holiday sales weekend to maximize top line performance in this competitive category. Black Friday discounts for women’s fashions ranged from 45.0% for JC Penney to 12.2% for Overstock. Top types of women’s fashions with Black Friday discounts included swimwear, lingerie and t-shirts, which reflect seasonal merchandise.

Additional discounts across products by “premiumness” level

For almost every retailer, the percentage of fashions with additional discounts was higher on Cyber Monday than on Black Friday. Target had the highest proportion (62.7% vs. 5.7% for JC Penney). It appears Target really wants to win value-seeking apparel shoppers, by offering additional discounts on 93.3% of fashions at the low premium level (vs. 4.6% for Walmart).

By contrast, Nordstrom had a higher percentage of fashions with additional discounts on Black Friday.

Most retailers (Amazon, Bloomingdale’s, Neiman Marcus, Overstock, Target and Walmart) offered deeper discounts on Cyber Monday than Black Friday, likely make room for new seasonal merchandise.

Neiman Marcus offered the most generous fashion discounts on Cyber Monday with an average additional discount of 30.1%, which ranged from 31.7% at the high premium level to 28.9% at the low premium level. This aggressive discounting could help Neiman Marcus stand out among department stores, and extend its reach and appeal by making fashions more affordable across price points.

Conversely, JC Penney, Macy’s and Nordstrom offered deeper discounts on Black Friday. All three department stores were most generous at the low premium level for fashions, with JC Penney offering the deepest discounts (47.8%) to turn low premium fashions into irresistible Black Friday bargains.

Additional discounts across products by “popularity” level

Almost all retailers offered a greater proportion of additional fashion discounts on Cyber Monday than on Black Friday, ranging from 69.2% for Target to 5.2% for JC Penney, with a direct relationship between product popularity and additional discount percentage. Across all levels of popularity for fashions, Target was by far the most aggressive with discounts to appeal to the broadest variety of fashion shoppers.

Only Nordstrom offered a higher proportion of additional discounts on fashions on Black Friday, focusing on both high and low levels of popularity.

Most retailers (Amazon, Neiman Marcus, Overstock, Target and Walmart) offered deeper fashion discounts on Cyber Monday than on Black Friday, with both Neiman Marcus and Target being the most generous (28.8%). Amazon and Neiman Marcus were most generous with discounts among less popular items, while Overstock, Target and Walmart were most generous among moderately popular fashions.

Conversely, JC Penney, Macy’s and Nordstrom offered more generous fashion discounts on Black Friday, with JC Penney being the most generous (39.2%). All three retailers offered the deepest discounts at the low level of popularity, possibly to make room for in-demand fashion items.

2020’s Fashionable Holiday Prices

As this year’s Black Friday and Cyber Monday fashion pricing results show, we prioritized comfort and basics over debonair formalwear. Since staying at home is in style, many retailers discounted dressier attire.

In terms of competitive pricing strategies, Target’s aggressive discounts could boost the chain’s appeal among diverse fashion shoppers. Also, Neiman Marcus stood out among department stores by extending its reach and affordability across pricing tiers.

Click here for more Black Friday and Cyber Monday analysis to learn about retailers’ holiday pricing strategies during 2020’s e-commerce boom.

December 11, 2020
Amazon’s losing its pricing advantage this holiday season

Amazon’s pricing advantage has declined in key categories, compared to last year as we enter 2020’s holiday season.

The holidays are here and the retail industry is gearing up for the yearly stampede. In a report published by Bain & Company, in partnership with DataWeave, it was observed that, “When it comes to pricing, Amazon’s historical advantage is also deteriorating. The research shows that in October and November 2019, Amazon matched or beat competitors’ prices 81% of the time in the categories studied. By November of 2020, that rate dropped to 74%”. This was based on the four key categories where we had pricing data for Amazon and at least one other competitor.

Amazon’s pricing advantage has declined in key categories

Aggressive pricing, which was once Amazon’s forte, seems to be on a downward trend this year. All but one category saw an increase in the percentage of products where they beat the lowest price, ‘movies, music, video games’ – by a small margin of one percentage point.

What could this shift be attributed to? The obvious would be the repercussions of COVID but there perhaps is more at work here. As observed last year, the behemoth that Amazon is, does not deter its competitors from constantly biting at the heels, with a steely determination to rope in market share. Everything from increased and specific customer demands, to government legislation, there are a lot of moving parts.

One thing is for sure, this is surely just the beginning of the great e-commerce battle. For access to the full article that was published in the Retail Holiday Newsletter by Bain & Company and powered by DataWeave, click here.

November 19, 2020
Amazon Great Indian Festival Vs Big Billion Day- Who offered better discounts?

The Great Indian Festival finally arrived and it coincided with Flipkart’s Big Billion Day Sale. The pandemic has pushed consumers to shop online and both, the Great Indian Festival and the Big Billion Day sales had been eagerly anticipated. Flipkart’s sale lasted between 16-21 October, while Amazon’s (in India) took started on 17th October.

It is claimed that Amazon and Flipkart have hit $3.5 billion in sales in just four days. On the last day of its Sale, Flipkart claimed to have achieved 10 times growth as compared to last year’s Big Billion Day sale. Clearly, the sales have surpassed all the forecasts made for this year’s sale. We at DataWeave took a closer look to analyze the discounts that were offered across popular categories, to see if customers really had access to better deals and discounts.

Our Methodology:

We looked at the top 500 products across categories like Fashion – men and women, electronics, Amazon devices, baby products, grocery and personal care. The pricing offered on these products across the sale period was compared with the pre-sale price, to understand the trend in discounts across the popular categories and brands.

The Verdict:

We segmented the products we were tracking into the following:

Type 1: Products were either priced the same or were discounted over the sale compared to pre-sale

Type 2: Products were either priced the same or witnessed price increase during the sale compared to pre-sale

Type 3: Products which saw both price increase and decrease during sale compared to pre-sale

Type 4: Products whose price continued to be the same even during the sale

Flipkart clearly provided the better deals to customers for the categories we looked at during their Big Billion Day sale compared to Amazon. Flipkart discounted 54% of its products during the sale period compared to Amazon, and 26% of the products were discounted.

It is also interesting to note that in addition to offering more discounted products, Flipkart also offered additional discounts than Amazon.

Amazon offered 13.2% additional discount and most of this average discounting can be attributed to a 33.8% discount on Amazon devices. It also ended up increasing the pricing for 16% of the products during the sale period, while Flipkart hiked the pricing for 6% products. 56% of products on Amazon continued being sold at the same price even during the sale.

Additional discounts across product premiumness levels

Premiumness was based on the actual price of a product before the sale event. This was divided into low, medium and high premiumness levels, with high indicating higher selling prices.

In Amazon devices, baby products, electronics and grocery-cooking essentials, Amazon showed a direct relationship between its additional discounts and the level of premiumness. While Flipkart did not seem to follow a particular pattern with respect to product premiumness.

Flipkart offered the highest discounts for premium products in the Fashion category (for both men and women) compared to the rest.

Top brands by additional discounts:

We looked at popular brands across categories to arrive at brands that were being sold at the maximum discount. These brands appeared at least twenty times in the top 500 ranks we considered.

Acer, Philips, Samsung, Lenovo, Bajaj, Asus which were common brands across both Flipkart and Amazon in the electronics category, were being sold at much deeper discounts on Flipkart (almost double), compared to that on Amazon.

Avita was extremely popular under the laptop sub-category on Flipkart and was observed to be discounted the highest during the sale.

In Fashion, Titan was the most discounted brand with 53.9% additional discount but only 4% and 2% of the products offered discounting in mens’ and womens’ fashion respectively. Reebok in mens’ fashion and Fastrack, Sonata and Puma in womens’ wear on Flipkart, had discounts across almost all the products.

In the baby care category, Hasbro gaming on Flipkart had the highest additional discount followed by Funskool. Both the brands had more than 85% of their products discounted.

Johnson’s, which was common on both Amazon and Flipkart, was offered at higher discounts on Amazon compared to Flipkart. However, only 31% products were discounted vs 72% on Flipkart.

Most Visible Brands

We looked at the top 200 ranks across each sub-category to narrow down on the most visible brands across the sale period.

Across all categories and their sub-categories, the sub-category laptop had distinct brands that hold the majority of the products. This is observed both in Amazon and Flipkart where brands like Lenovo, HP, Asus hold more than 33% share of the first 200 products.

“Mobile” category was dominated by brands like Redmi and Boat on Amazon, and Realme and OPPO on Flipkart. These brands occur at least 24% of the time in the top 200 ranks.

Who Won?

There are many ways to look at this. To begin with, the combined sales of Flipkart and Amazon during the festive season in India accounted for more than 90% of the e-commerce industry’s gross sales. That amounts to a 55% year-on-year growth. Delving further, we see that Flipkart was far more aggressive with their offerings.

They discounted 56.8% additional products at an overall discount of 15%. On the other hand, Amazon retained their typical cautious approach to discounting, with only 28.4% of the products, at an overall discount of 12.8%.

If we adopt a more macro view of the sales, we have to take into account that this year is somewhat of an anomaly. Given the social distancing norms and other SOPs governing the common man, more people have been ushered into the world of online shopping. The penetration extended far into the Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities as well, thus potentially benefiting Flipkart, owing to their interior reach.

Going by the numbers, Flipkart seems to have taken this round without a doubt. As we observed though, there are many ways to look at this and what seems to stand out from these two giants, is the consumer. At the end of the day, it’s the consumer that in spite of these strange times, has shopped more than before, indicating that the situation is getting back to a semblance of normalcy.

So Flipkart’s got the sales numbers but the consumer got deeper discounts on more products. As the old adage goes, ‘consumer is king’.

November 4, 2020
Black Friday 2019 Pricing for Online Furniture

For today’s shoppers, instant gratification is the need of the hour. It’s, therefore, no surprise that furniture e-retail has been picking up steam over the last decade. What was once a norm to physically touch and feel before making a purchase, is now just a few clicks away. Retailers have bridged the gap by making the purchase process as seamless as possible – easy finance options, hassle-free returns and variety.

While several factors play a role in driving consumers to shop furniture goods online, price is the primary motivator, as is the case with most popular product categories sold online.

During Black Friday 2019, DataWeave performed an analysis on a sample of 23,000+ products across six of the top furniture retailers – Amazon, Home Depot, JCPenney, Target, Walmart and Wayfair. Ten product types were covered in the furniture category (such as Beds, Bookcases, Mattresses, Sofas, etc.) and the analysis focused on the top 500 ranked products of each product type.

To get an accurate depiction of the additional markdowns during the sale, we took the mode of the prices for the preceding week and compared them with that during the sale.

Additional markdowns

Target (25%) and Home Depot (21%) marked down their prices most aggressively during the sale. JCPenney and Wayfair stood out for offering additional markdowns on the highest portions of their ranges (67% and 46% respectively), even though the average markdown percentage was fairly conservative. Amazon and Walmart were steady as usual, with additional markdowns of 8% and 10% on 15% and 17% of their assortment, respectively.

Premiumness

To further understand the furniture pricing strategies of these retailers, we categorized their products into buckets of how expensive or cheap the product is (High, Medium, and Low in terms of price), relative to the rest of the products hosted by the retailer, and studied how the additional markdowns varied across these buckets. Where the MRP was not displayed, the most expensive price of the product during the holiday period prior to Black Friday was considered to define the “premiumness” of the product.

Two patterns clearly stand out from this analysis. Most of the retailers remained relatively equitable between their premium categories with nothing significant to report in terms of varying markdowns. Home Depot and and JCPenney are the only exceptions here, but not by much. The other interesting insight is that the percentage of marked-down products had a near unanimous pattern of the high level being the most covered, followed by the medium and then low.

Therefore, while there wasn’t a significant variation in the average markdown across premiumness levels, a larger portion of the high-premium goods were consistently offered at a discount across all retailers.

Popularity

Much like our premiumness categorization, we investigated products based on their popularity levels as well. We’ve defined popularity using a combination of the average review rating and the number of reviews for each product, condensed to a scale of low, medium and high.

We observe slightly different furniture pricing strategies adopted by retailers across popularity levels. While Home Depot, Amazon, and Wayfair chose to provide higher markdowns on their more popular products, Target, JCPenney, Walmart chose to provide higher markdowns on their least popular products. In addition, a larger portion of the least popular products were consistently offered on discount by almost all retailers.

In combination with our findings across premiumness levels, we can surmise that part of the strategy of most retailers was to liquidate their stock of expensive and unpopular products during the sale.

Price Change Activity

As part of our analysis, we also tracked the level of pricing activity across retailers over the last week of November, in terms of the number of price changes made as well as the average price variation for each retailer.

In general, we can see that Amazon and Walmart consistently made several price changes through the week, though the average magnitudes of these price changes were relatively low. This echoes the pattern we’ve observed through our analysis of other product categories during the sale event, as well.

Also, we see an almost coordinated increase in the number of price changes and the average magnitude across the 27th and 28th of November. This is likely an attempt by the retailers to get a head start on Black Friday deals.

An unusual and interesting pattern was observed with Wayfair, which started out the week with the most changes at 2500. It then tanked the next day and hovered around 500 till the 28th, only to spike to 2500 again. All these changes though, had their variation in and around 5%.

In summary, its interesting to observe how different retailers approached the much-anticipated holiday season sale events differently. As one might expect, there are significant variations among retailers in the aggressiveness of discounting activity as they approached Black Friday, and on Black Friday itself. Contrasting pricing strategies for popular and premium goods were also observed.

If you would like to learn more about the pricing of top U.S. retailers across other product categories like consumer electronics, fashion, and beauty & health, check out our series of articles on Black Friday 2019.

January 8, 2020
Health & Beauty on Black Friday: Analyzing Pricing Strategies of Top U.S. Retailers

We’ve come a long way from face paint and medicinal herbs to multi-billion dollar industries revolving around health and beauty. Customers are getting increasingly bombarded with variety that promises something for everyone. In fact, a recent DataWeave study identified Health & Beauty as one of the most popular CPG categories in the U.S., both in terms of assortment strength and brand concentration. As with most other categories, pricing activity around Health & Beauty is especially abuzz when Thanksgiving weekend comes around.

As part of our series of articles analyzing the pricing of leading retailers across categories on Black Friday, the DataWeave team performed an analysis on a sample of 14,000+ products across six top retailers – Amazon, JC Penney, Macy’s, Nordstrom, Target and Walmart. Seven product types were covered across the category, such as Fragrance, Hair Care, Makeup, etc. and the analysis focused on the top 500 ranked products of each product type.

Additional markdowns

For this analysis, we considered the mode of the prices for the week before and compared it with that during the sale. This painted a picture of the additional markdowns for the duration of the sale.

Similar to our prior coverage of the Fashion category during Black Friday, Macy’s had the broadest reach in terms of the marked down products at 25.6%. The average percentage of the markdowns was 22% and was only eclipsed by JC Penney with an average of 34.7%, though this was only offered on 3% of its range. At the other end of the spectrum, Amazon and Walmart had the lowest markdowns at 8.9% and 8.4% respectively but were among the top three in products covered (18% & 12%). Target and Nordstrom offered mid-range markdowns across the board but on a rather conservative selection of products of 5% and 3%, respectively.

Additional markdowns by product types

When we delved further into the product types, we noticed that a majority of the retailers heavily marked down makeup, shampoo & conditioner and men’s hair care products. The table illustrates the top three discounted categories for each retailer we analyzed.

Premiumness

We categorized the products across retailers into buckets of how expensive or cheap a product is, relative to the rest of the products hosted by the retailer in the respective product type. Where the MRP was not displayed, the most expensive price of the product during the holiday period prior to Black Friday was considered for this categorization. We then tagged products as High, Medium and Low in terms of product premiumness, with High referring to the more expensive products.

In line with previous trends, Macy’s had the highest markdown on its high level products at 32.8%. It also had the widest coverage for the category at 20%. Amazon, Macy’s, Target, Walmart followed the expected approach of providing higher markdowns on the more premium products, and also on a higher portion of these products. This would be consistent with their goal of providing attractive offers on premium goods while also protecting their margins.

JC Penney and Nordstrom were exceptions here, with JC Penney providing higher markdowns on its cheaper goods, while Nordstrom focused its markdowns on the medium bucket. That being said, it should be reiterated that the portion of products with markdowns for both thee retailers was relatively small.

Popularity

Similar to categorizing the products at levels of product premiumness, we categorized them into levels of popularity as well. Here, popularity is defined using a combination of the average review rating and number of reviews obtained for each product.

Interestingly, no consistent pattern has emerged that indicates a strategic focus on factoring product popularity into their pricing strategies for Black Friday.

Macy’s, JC Penney, and Nordstrom chose to provide higher markdowns on their highly popular products, of which only JC Penney and Macy’s chose to also markdown a higher portion of their highly popular products. It was just as common though to see retailers (including Amazon) marking down the prices of their least popular products. This is likely an attempt by the retailers to liquidate their excessive stock of less popular products during the sale.

Price Change Activity

As documented quite often in recent years, the Black Friday sale is no longer limited only to a single day, but attractive offers are often seen right through November, especially over the last week of the month. We tracked the level of pricing activity across retailers over the last week of November, in terms of number of price changes as well as the average price variation for each retailer.

In typical fashion, we observed that Amazon had the most number of pricing changes by a large margin, peaking at 2500 for the set of products tracked. The next in line was Walmart a long way down at 618 changes on the 27th. Even after the multiple changes, their average price change variation remained at the lower end of the scale – in and around 10%.

The rest of the retailers exercised fewer price changes, with the slight exception of Macy’s in the days leading up to Black Friday. However, the changes almost ceased from the day before only to marginally rise on the 29th.

While all the retailers tended to follow a predictable pattern of decreasing variation on the 28th and sharply increasing it the next day, Nordstrom and Walmart did the exact opposite, having likely chosen to jump the gun in offering discounts during Black Friday.

Conclusion

To conclude, we deduced that Macy’s had relatively higher markdowns on more of its products than the rest. JC Penney, Nordstrom and Target offered high markdowns on the face of it but on a very small section of products. Unsurprisingly, Amazon and Walmart stayed true to their past patterns and remained conservative in their additional markdowns during the sale but generous in their reach.

Have a look here at our other observations regarding the Black Friday sale and stay tuned for more insights from our analysis of other product categories!

December 19, 2019
Fashion on Black Friday: Decoding Pricing Strategies of Top U.S. Retailers

Over the last few Thanksgiving Weekend sales, fashion, what was a category once typically reserved for offline purchases, has evolved into a regularly marked down and popular category as shoppers get more comfortable making these purchases online. This can be credited to the ease of purchase that retailers offer – trials, returns, etc. combined with the desire for shoppers to refresh their wardrobe for the new year ahead.

At DataWeave, we performed an analysis on a sample of 40,000+ products across six of the top fashion retailers – Amazon, Bloomingdale’s, Macy’s, Nordstrom, Target and Walmart. . Twenty product types were covered across both men’s and women’s fashion and the analysis focused on the top 500 ranked products of each product type.

Additional Markdowns

For the sake of this analysis, we compared the prices during the sale with the mode of the prices the week before. This gave us a clear picture of the additional markdowns during the sale period and therefore, the additional value to shoppers.

Dominating the fashion space, Nordstrom and Macy’s came in hot with the most aggressive discounts on the largest share of their product range, 36% and 27% respectively, on more than a quarter of their range. In the women’s lineup, Target offered a 36% markdown, compared to ~22% for its men’s lineup. Across both categories though, this was only on 1% of Target’s range. In what seems to be an expected trend, Amazon and Walmart remained relatively conservative with their additional markdowns, as they tend to be competitively priced even during non-sale periods.

Drilling down into the product types, we noticed that very aggressive markdowns were being offered on t-shirts and skirts (over 40%). Swimwear, hosiery, handbags, and sunglasses were other product types that were featured with attractive prices across websites.

Product Premiumness

We categorized the products across retailers into buckets of how expensive or cheap the product is, relative to the rest of the products hosted by the retailer. Where the MRP was not displayed, the most expensive price of the product during the holiday period prior to Black Friday was considered. We then bucketed products in categories of High, Medium and Low of product premiumness, with High containing the more expensive products by price.

Amazon, Bloomingdale’s, Macy’s and Nordstrom chose to markdown the more expensive products in their range higher than the rest of their assortment. This aligns well with what one would expect retailers to do as shoppers tend to expect attractive offers on the more expensive range of products. Also, with the more expensive products, retailers and brands likely have more room to be flexible with margins. Amazon shows a consistent strategy here, having provided higher markdowns on a relatively higher portion of its most premium products and vice versa. This trend can only otherwise partially be seen with Macy’s.

Walmart though, chose to go the other route and provided higher markdowns on its least premium products. This might have been a targeted effort to maintain their perception among shoppers as a destination for affordable goods. Though it’s important to note here that these markdowns were seen only on a small set of cheap goods – just over 5%.

Price Change Activity

Walmart, Nordstrom and to an extent, Bloomingdale’s, had an almost consistent number of price changes throughout the week. Nordstrom recorded the most significant dip in the magnitude of the markdowns over time.

Amazon and to a smaller degree, Macy’s, had more price changes during the week. However, Amazon’s average price variation remained among the lowest whereas Macy’s clocked in the highest by Black Friday at just under 40%.

Across the board, the price changes dipped on the 28th and then rose again on the 29th. This can be seen as a conscious effort to have more aggressive activity on Black Friday.

In summary, fashion-first retailers like Macy’s and Bloomingdale’s went all-in during the sale, while Nordstrom, a multi-category retailer, stood out for its aggressive focus on fashion.

Amazon and Walmart continued to operate within the competitive space that they’ve carved out for themselves as the leading retailers in the US. We observed a similar trend even in the other product categories we’ve analyzed for the sale. Check out our analysis of the Electronics category during Black Friday here.

December 11, 2019
Black Friday Sale: Breaking Down Pricing Strategies in Consumer Electronics

Online holiday shopping (Nov-Dec) in the US for 2019 is projected to be $143.7B, a 14.1% increase from 2018. This sets a rather exciting stage for retail giants in the battle to claim market share. Interesting patterns emerge as each one tries to out-smart the other. Black Friday, in particular, is when most of the activity was expected to be concentrated.

Inevitably, consumer electronics had strong representation, according to research by Coresight. As traffic steers more towards online shopping, there’s an increased sense of comfort in purchasing big ticket items on an ecommerce platform. There are multiple reasons why electronics lead the race during the holiday season – easy to gift, personal indulgence, comparatively shorter shelf life and well, because who among us can really resist a gadget on sale.

In line with expectations during the season, there’s been a slew of generous discounts across the board. According to prior trends, Amazon was on course to be the lowest priced. In order to assess this, we decided to study a sample of 1000 products on Amazon and match them against its competitors like Walmart, Target, Best Buy and New Egg. Doing this gave us an accurate picture of the comparative pricing across retailers during this season, right up to Black Friday.

Competitive Pricing Analysis

There is a commonly held assumption that Amazon is the lowest priced retailer in most cases. How true is that? Here are our findings:

We tracked the split across three scenarios during the holiday period – Amazon being exclusively the lowest priced, Amazon sharing the lowest priced spot and Amazon not being the lowest priced.

Clearly, Amazon monopolized the share of lowest priced products during the entire period – with its share of lowest priced products ranging between 86% and 60%. The dip from 86% to 60% was immediate on the 27th, as Amazon’s competitors caught up. In general, Amazon’s share of lowest priced products fell from 76% to 62% on Black Friday, as its competitors launched their most aggressive promotional campaigns for the holiday season. As shown in the next chart below, a large portion of this can be attributed to Target’s pricing activity.

Relative Price Index

From 21 November until Black Friday, we calculated the price index across retailers, which indicates the relative pricing levels each day for the set of matched products – the lower the price index, the lower the average relative price.

Unsurprisingly, Amazon has been consistently the lowest priced by a fair margin. A few rungs down, New Egg and Fry’s have been going head-to-head with their price positions. Target on the other hand, underwent a spike in relative pricing from 26-28 November. To sum up, in order of lowest pricing, it’s Amazon, Best Buy, Walmart, New Egg, Fry’s and Target.

Additional Markdowns

While the insights above were unearthed by comparing the products of retailers against a sample of 1000 Amazon products, we went further and performed a separate analysis on a different sample of 15,000+ products across retailers, which focussed on the top 500 ranked products of each product type for Amazon, Best Buy, Target and Walmart. The product types considered include Digital Cameras, DSLRs, Headphones, Laptops, Mobile Phones, Refrigerators, Tablets, Televisions, USB Flash Drives and Wearables.

Here, we compared the prices during the sale with the mode of the prices of the same retailer the week before. This put into perspective the level of additional markdowns during the sale period, enabling us to better understand the additional value to shoppers during the sale period (since discounts are often offered during non-sale periods too).

Looking at opposite ends of the spectrum, we find Amazon with the least drastic markdowns during the sale as it tends to consistently have lower prices across the board. At the other end, there’s Best Buy and Target with the most aggressive markdowns; Target taking the lead, 25.5% on 35% of its products, which is also consistent with the activity we observed in the previous sample of matched products.

Going further, we’ve broken down the markdown activity by the top product types for each retailer. Across the board, we observe attractive discounts on Headphones, USB Flash Drives and Mobile Phones.

Price Change Activity

With the proliferation of pricing intelligence tools (often driven by algorithms), dynamic pricing is a commonly observed behavior among retailers. We analyzed this trend during the holiday period to identify the retailers that are most aggressive in their price change activity. The following charts reveal the number of price changes performed by retailers in our sample as well as the average price variation during this holiday period.

Amazon made several price changes during the week but with a relatively low magnitude, since it was the lowest priced anyway through the week. The only other player with similar activity was Walmart. Target and Best Buy had significantly fewer price changes but when they did make the changes, the magnitude was much larger. Their focus was solely on a smaller, select set of products where they went all in.

In conclusion

As the years advance, the duration of holiday sales is no longer restricted to the actual holiday, but the days preceding and following them as well. With more and more people getting increasingly comfortable with online shopping (14.1% increase from 2018), buying habits are evolving too. Big retailers are cashing in on this and driving their pricing strategies to keep up with the evolution.

One of the clear cut findings from our research is that there are two primary paths they take: smaller additional markdowns over a longer period and larger additional markdowns over a shorter period. Whichever path they choose, retailers need to be on top of the game with valuable insights, that give them a competitive edge. For accurate and large scale competitive intelligence, reach out to us.

December 5, 2019
Amazon on course for an aggressive Black Friday

The holidays are around the corner and that much awaited holiday cheer, has now become directly proportional to the arrival of an Amazon package. According to a new report, in partnership with Bain & Company, DataWeave has observed that early in November, Amazon had the lowest price 30%-50% of the time and matched the lowest price 35%-60% of the remaining cases, based on an analysis performed on a sample of over 16,000 products across 10 websites and 5 product categories.

Aggressive pricing strategies have been Amazon’s modus operandi for a while now and it’s not about to change this season. In the build up to the Black Friday promotions this year, they even slashed their prices of the rarely discounted Apple products, such as the iPad Pro. This sets the tone for what shoppers can expect as the holiday season comes upon us.

Results of a recent survey, published as part of the Bain report, revealed that ‘value for money’ was the primary concern that influence purchasing decisions, across categories. In the same breath, the respondents went on to say that they perceive Amazon as a ‘value leader’, sans womens’ clothing and pet supplies.

Although this season might continue to see Amazon rake in the most market share, competitors are not far behind. There’s heavy investment from the likes of Walmart and others in order to negate the effects of the undercut. If these competitive responses become louder, the dent on customer perception could begin to tilt to more neutral ground.

Stay tuned as we follow this pattern during the season and release our findings over the next few weeks.

For access to the full article that was published in the Retail Holiday Newsletter by Bain & Company and powered by DataWeave, click here.

November 27, 2019
Prime Day 2019 Fashion: Were the Deals as Attractive as the Merchandise?

Target and Walmart offered more appealing discounts than Amazon during Prime Day 2019.

Statista estimates that e-commerce fashion accounted for approximately 20.4% of overall fashion retail sales in the United States in 2018, which amounted to about $103 billion in absolute terms. According to Internet Retailer, apparel is the largest and among the most competitive retail categories in e-commerce. Moreover, as a share of total apparel and accessories sales, online apparel sales is growing at a faster rate than US e-commerce as a whole.

Given the high-growth and competitive nature of the category, we at DataWeave were interested to find out how high the stakes got during the fifth annual Prime Day earlier this month.

Our Methodology

Since Prime Day is no longer necessarily an Amazon event (since competing websites often offer attractive discounts as well), we tracked the pricing of several leading retailers selling fashion apparel, footwear, and accessories to assess their pricing and product strategies during the sale event. Our analysis was focused on additional discounts offered during the sale to estimate the true value that the sale represented to its customers. We calculated this by comparing product prices on Prime Day versus the same prices prior to the sale.

Our sample consisted of 20 product types across women’s as well as men’s fashion categories. While we did monitor exclusive fashion retailers Macy’s, Bloomingdales, Nordstrom, and Neiman Marcus, we did not find them offering any additional discounts – an interesting insight all on its own since they’ve clearly chosen not to compete with Amazon during the two days of the Prime Day sale. We therefore restricted the rest of our study to Amazon, Target, and Walmart – the latter two of which interestingly offered immensely aggressive discounts in their apparel categories.

The Verdict

Despite owning the day at least in name, Amazon was found to offer the lowest additional discounts among the retailers studied. Target and Walmart, on the other hand, ensured that they didn’t lose out on market share this Prime Day by offering substantially high discounts of their own. While Target was the most aggressive with a steep average markdown of 26.5%, Amazon closed out the bottom at 8.4%.

Walmart and Target didn’t seem particularly focused on compensating their sharp discounts with price increases in other products – their focus seems to have been solely only on offering timely discounts during the sale. Amazon, on the other hand, marked up just about as many products as it marked down, with the markup margin being close to double that of the markdown in an effort to protect margins during the sale.

Top product types by additional discount

Target and Walmart both offered aggressive discounts across their top product categories. Walmart ended up with a marginally higher overall average additional discounts on product types like Shirts, T-shirts, and Tops.

Interestingly, though Amazon offered moderate discounts across its top categories (Lingerie, Swimwear, and Underwear), the volume of marked down products was very limited.

Additional discounts across popularity levels

We determined popularity using a combination of average review rating and number of reviews, and the resulting scores were categorized as low, moderate, and high.

When it came to discounting popular products, there were clear differences in strategy among all the three retailers. Amazon, which interestingly had close to 60% of its products in the low popularity bucket, chose to offer the highest discounts in the same category – indicating an effort to clear its stock of unpopular products. Target and Walmart, on the other hand, focused their discounts on moderate rated products.

Additional discounts across product “premiumness” levels

Premiumness was calculated as the average selling price before the sale event. This was divided into four percentile blocks, with higher percentile blocks indicating higher selling prices.

As found in the electronics and furniture categories that were analyzed previously, most of the discounting activity was focused on the lower end of the premium spectrum with a view to protect margin – despite a largely equitable distribution of discounted products across percentile ranges (with the exception of Target, which had a discounted assortment heavily dominated by its least premium products).

This indicates a clear strategy to protect margins, while still maintaining the perception of promoting attractive offers to draw traffic. Target and Walmart both offered substantial additional discounts of close to 30% on their least premium products, while at 12%, Amazon offered less than half that discount.

Additional discounts across visibility levels

Given the fairly large number of SKUs across the fashion category in general, the discounts across visibility levels understandably didn’t vary much when compared to the more pronounced fluctuations observed in the electronics and furniture categories. This is also largely because consumers tend to explore lower ranked products more so in the fashion category than in other categories.

Across product categories, we’re seeing lower-than-expected additional discounts on Amazon this Prime Day, coupled with more aggressive pricing activity by Amazon’s competitors. While this puts more pressure on Amazon, this also is a strong validation of Prime Day as a key annual sale event on the US shopper’s calendar.

Curious to know how Amazon and its competitors performed in other product categories this Prime Day? Watch this space for more!

July 29, 2019
Online Furniture Pricing Strategies on 2019 Prime Day

Just as with electronics, other retailers actually offered far better discounts than Amazon during Prime Day 2019.

Online furniture sales have risen significantly since the 2000s, driven largely by a growing array of products, and even more so by the convenience of avoiding travel and crowded stores. According to Statista, online furniture and homeware sales were estimated to reach approximately $190 billion in 2018, with China and the United States accounting for over $60 billion in revenue each.

Thus, furniture has quickly become a key product category during sale events globally – and Prime Day was no different. At DataWeave, we got down to figuring out exactly how plum those deals were this year.

Our Methodology

We tracked the pricing of several leading retailers selling home and furniture products to assess their pricing and product strategies during the sale events. Our analysis was focused on additional discounts offered during the sale to estimate the true value that the sale represented to its customers. We calculated this by comparing product prices on Prime Day versus the same prices prior to the sale. Our sample consisted of the top 1,000 ranked products across 10 popular product types, including beds, dining table sets, sofas, entertainment units, and coffee tables – analyzed for five retailers (Amazon, Home Depot, Target, Walmart, and Wayfair).

The Verdict

As we found in the electronics category, there were surprising price spikes in this category too – with Target reporting an average increase as high as 14.7%, and Amazon clocking a still moderately high 9.4%. Target also reported the highest distribution of products with price markups. Home Depot indicated the lowest price increase at 4.6%.

When it came to additional discounts, Amazon fell short of expectations – at 4.7%, it offered the lowest average among its competitors. Target, on the other hand, was extremely aggressive both in terms of additional discounts and volume of discounted products.

To conclude, all the retailers observed seemed to be keeping a close watch on their margins by countering price reductions with nearly equivalent surges elsewhere in their assortment.

While there was no single product type that was found to be popular across all five retailers, it was clear that Target was again the most aggressive at offering discounts. It also had among the largest product ranges on discount.

Amazon chose to follow a very moderate route both in terms of average discount and discounted product volume.

Additional discounts across popularity levels

We determined popularity using a combination of average review rating and number of reviews, and the resulting scores were categorized as low, moderate, and high.

There doesn’t seem to have been much of a focus on low-popularity products in terms of additional discounts. Most of the attention was focused on products with moderate popularity, since there isn’t much of a need to be aggressive on price for highly popular products, and products with lower popularity aren’t really worth promoting.

The only retailer that offered a higher discount on its most popular products was Home Depot. Walmart, too, seemed reluctant to let go of the opportunity to capitalize on popularity – it chose to offer the same discount on moderately as well as highly popular products.

Interestingly, Walmart seems to have a disproportionately large share of products in its low popularity category – something it should possibly evaluate in the future in terms of brand quality, products, and service.

The percentage distribution of products mostly indicated a linear relationship, with the highest distribution usually being offered for highly popular products. The exception was Wayfair, which offered a much larger array in its moderately popular category.

Additional discounts across product “premiumness” levels

Premiumness was calculated as the average selling price before the sale event. This was divided into four percentile blocks, with higher percentile blocks indicating higher selling prices.

Most of the discounting activity seems to have occurred in the lower end of the premium spectrum, with a view to protect margin – despite a largely healthy distribution of products across percentile ranges. This indicates a clear strategy to protect margins, while also promoting attractive offers to draw traffic.

However, there are a couple of exceptions – Target was consistent throughout the “premiumness” spectrum, resulting in the highest overall discounting activity. Home Depot too was aggressive, but selectively so – it chose attractive pricing for the lower and higher ends of its assortment.

As expected, many retailers showed higher discounting activity in the higher ranks of their listing pages. As usual, though, there are a few exceptions here too. Home Depot and Wayfair indicated unusual patterns – perhaps relying on search results as opposed to organic listing page results. On the other hand, Target again indicated a consistent pattern, with mostly similar discounts across visibility levels.

Overall, across all parameters analyzed, both the Electronics and Furniture categories have been treated quite similarly in terms of pricing activity by most retailers. Is Prime Day really all about its marketing hype, or will it live up to its promise in at least one segment? Stay with us to find out as we follow through with our series of articles analyzing various product categories on this year’s Prime Day.

July 24, 2019
A Study of Deals on Amazon Prime Day 2019 | DataWeave

Our preliminary analysis reveals that Prime Day 2019 had other retailers offering better deals than Amazon in many cases.

As Prime Day extended into an additional day this year, Amazon seems to be hitting the right note with its customers, going by the revenue it’s raking in. This year, the longest Prime Day event ever witnessed a sales increase of 72% – overtaking Black Friday and Cyber Monday combined.

At DataWeave, we were curious to find out how prime these deals were, and if in fact other retailers were offering better discounts. We started with the electronics category, which remains among the most popular categories year on year.

Our Methodology

We tracked the pricing of several leading retailers selling consumer electronics to assess their pricing and product strategies during the sale event. Our analysis was focused on additional discounts offered during the sale to estimate the true value that the sale represented to its customers. We calculated this by comparing product prices on Prime Day versus the prices prior to the sale. Our sample consisted of up to the top 1,000 ranked products across 10 popular product types in consumer electronics on Amazon, Best Buy, Target, and Walmart.

The Verdict

What we found most surprising was that across retailers, some portions of the assortment underwent price increases as well. While Amazon indicated the lowest increase at 9.1%, Best Buy indicated an increase as high as 27.1%. However, Amazon reported the highest percentage of products (6.9%) that showed a price increase.

Equally surprising was that Amazon reported the lowest price reduction at 6.3% – Walmart, Target, and Best Buy in fact reduced their prices by much larger margins than Amazon did. A point to note here, however, is that Amazon did report the highest percentage of additionally discounted products – with Best Buy coming in at a close second.

This goes to show that Prime Day, for all its hype, does not in truth offer the best deals to Amazon shoppers. This, of course, is expected based on the competitors’ perspective of wanting to avoid losing market share. As a result, shoppers would be well advised to compare prices across websites to find the best deal.

Top product types by additional discount

USB flash drives were a popular product category across all four retailers analyzed, with Best Buy offering the best average additional discount at 40.7%. Other popular product types ranged from the usual personal devices such as mobile phones, tablets, and smartwatches to home appliances such as refrigerators and TVs.

Additional discounts across popularity levels

We determined popularity using a combination of average review rating and number of reviews, and the resulting scores were categorized as low, moderate, and high.

Interestingly, discounts were not found to be directly proportional to popularity. Except Walmart, all the retailers tended to offer the best discounts on products that enjoyed moderate popularity. This makes sense, since there isn’t a strong need to be aggressive on price for highly popular products in any case. On the other hand, products with lower popularity aren’t really worth promoting. Walmart, which was the exception, reported a higher discount on low- and high-popularity products than it did on moderately popular products.

The percentage distribution of products did mostly show a directly proportional relationship, with the highest distribution usually being offered for highly popular products. The exception in this case was Best Buy, which evidenced a much higher distribution in its moderately popular goods.

Additional discounts across product “premiumness” levels

Premiumness was calculated as the average selling price before the sale event. This was divided into four percentile blocks, with higher percentile blocks indicating higher selling prices.

In general, all retailers were found to have slightly higher additional discounts in the lower end of the “premiumness” spectrum. This is still a smart move, as it enables sellers to save on margin while still promoting attractive discount percentages. Interestingly, Amazon offered the lowest additional discount – a flat 5% – across all categories, despite offering more or less competitive product distributions compared to other retailers.

Additional discounts across visibility levels

Here, too, the lower end of the spectrum mostly witnessed higher additional discounts. This tactic actually offers double benefits – one, the most attractive discounts are offered in the higher realms of visibility, thus effectively enticing consumers to buy these products, and two, it helps build a low price perception (despite this not holding good as one delves deeper into the higher ranks). Again, it’s interesting to note that Amazon didn’t offer the highest discounts here either – in fact, it mostly offered the lowest additional discounts.

All in all, it seems that Prime Day isn’t all it’s hyped up to be, at least not in the Electronics segment. How about other categories? Watch this space for more insights!

July 22, 2019
Thanksgiving Weekend Sale: How Top US Consumer Brands Fared

Online retailers in the US have enjoyed an impressive turnover during 2018’s Thanksgiving weekend sale. Over the last few weeks, DataWeave has published deep-dive reports on the performance of top US retailers in fashion and consumer electronics during this period, detailing their discounting and product strategies across several product types.

In continuation of our series of articles on the Thanksgiving weekend sale, this article focuses specifically on the top brands across all retailers analyzed.

Read Also:

A Study of Fashion Retail Pricing Across Thanksgiving, Black Friday and Cyber Monday 2018

How Consumer Electronics Was Priced Across Thanksgiving, Black Friday and Cyber Monday 2018

While a lot of attention from the media and analysts during these sale events is often focused on the strategies and performance of retailers, the festive sale period is equally vital for consumer brands. Both established brands and new entrants across all categories compete aggressively to gain market share during a period that accounts for a substantial portion of annual sales turnover.

For brands, the two primary drivers of conversion specific to sale events are competitive pricing and prominent brand visibility. At DataWeave, we went about analyzing which brands came out on top across retailers and categories during the Thanksgiving weekend sale, based on these two factors.

Our Methodology

We tracked the pricing of 6 leading fashion retailers and 5 major consumer electronics retailers to study the pricing strategies of brands during the sale events. Our analysis focused on additional discounts offered during the sale period to evaluate the true value of the sale event to customers. To calculate this effect, we compared the pricing of products on Thanksgiving Day, Black Friday and Cyber Monday to the pricing of products prior to the sale commencing. We considered the Top 500 ranked products on 11 product types across Men’s and Women’s Fashion and 11 popular consumer electronics products for this analysis.

Consumer Electronics Brands

In digital cameras, Canon’s traditional role as a discount leader was on show, featuring on both Best Buy (14%) and Target (20%), the two most aggressive price discounters in consumer electronics. Nikon took Canon’s place in DSLR cameras, for Best Buy (13%), New Egg (10%) and Walmart (4%), albeit at a comparatively low additional discount point.

Razor benefited from Amazon’s strategy of promoting its lower-priced products, promoting a modest 9% additional discount but across its entire range of laptop products. The competitiveness of this category between brands is shown by Samsung’s decision to give an additional 53% discount across 36% of its product line at Best Buy.

The strategic approach brands take with different retailers was illustrated by HP’s 30% additional discount on 31% of its products at Target while over at Walmart, HP had a dire a 4% additional discount on a mere 13% of its products. A similar strategy was employed by LG with its televisions. On Amazon, its TVs had a 10% additional discount applied to 46% of its products, while at New Egg that translated to 25% and 8% respectively.

Among the fast emerging wearables category, under-pressure Chinese firm Huawei dropped an aggressive 46% additional discount on 100% of its product range at Best Buy. By comparison, the next highest in this category was Marc Jacobs at Target with 33% and 40% respectively.

Most Visible Brands Across Product Types

In our analysis, brand visibility is represented in terms of both the number of products for each brand, as well as the average rank of all its products (“lower” the rank value, higher is the visibility).

The influence an online retailer exerted on a brand’s average ranking is illustrated by Canon’s digital cameras. On Amazon, its 296 products had an average ranking of 272, while on Best Buy it was 30 and 48, 73 and 212 on New Egg and 20 and 69 on Walmart. For all these retailers, Canon was the most visible brand in digital cameras, despite such variation.

It was a similar story on laptops, with HP’s Amazon ranking of 298 based on 166 products, contrasting with a Target ranking of 14 on 18 products and Walmart ranking of 21 on 20 products.

These patterns appear to play out in TVs too, with Samsung’s Amazon average ranking of 292 based on 150 products contrasting with Walmart average ranking of 10 across 7 products.

Unsurprisingly, across our analysis of additional discounts and brand visibility, the top brands are well known and recognizable brands in each product type, with very few new entrants breaking out from the pack. This story, though, takes a turn in the following analysis on visibility growth.

Brands With Highest Growth in Visibility

To perform this analysis, we developed an index for the visibility of a brand based on the number of products available per brand as well as the average rank of those products. We then compared this score for each brand between before and during the sale period, and subsequently calculated the percentage growth.

The list of brands that showed the highest growth in visibility for each product type is an interesting mix of well established and newer brands. The usual suspects included the likes of Philips, Fitbit, Sony, Kodak, Nikon, etc. The presence of brands like Apple, Google, and Bose is surprising as they would be expected to command strong visibility even before the sale. Some of the newer brands include Rha, Westinghouse, Garmin, Lanruo, and more.

Some brands showed a dramatic increase in visibility. Examples include Bose on Walmart (698%), HTC on New Egg (657%), Galanz on Amazon (657%), and Jlab on Target (608%).

Kodak’s digital cameras (2% growth) on Best Buy took the honors for the lowest increase in visibility, just ahead of HP laptops (3%) on Walmart, Nostalgia Electrics refrigerators (4%) and Belkin Tablets (7%) both on sale at Target. These numbers indicate a relatively static assortment for the respective retailers and product types.

Fashion Brands

Moving over to the Fashion category, we observed significantly more aggressive discounting activity, as expected. Parent’s Choice T-shirts recorded the highest additional discount (80%) applied to the widest product range (Walmart 91%). Similarly, Fruit of the Loom saw Amazon promote a 78% additional discount applied across 20% of its products.

In shoes, Macy’s promoted a 60% additional discount on 50% of Kenneth Cole’s product range. In watches, Amazon featured a 57% additional discount on 50% of Kate Spade New Year branded products. Meanwhile, in sunglasses, Ray Ban in Bloomingdale’s enjoyed a 20% additional discount spread across a whopping 95% of its products, compared to just a 14% additional discount applied to a mere 10% of Ray Ban products in New Egg.

In stark contrast to what was observed in Electronics, the Fashion category saw fewer large brands dominate the discounting landscape across categories. This isn’t surprising given how the Fashion category tends to be cluttered with a plethora of brands, while the Electronics category usually consists of a leaner set of popular brands in each product type.

Most Visible Brands Across Product Types

In casual shoes, Nike’s ranking of 264 on 93 and Converse’s ranking of 239 on 89 products contrasted with Vision Street Wear’s ranking of 8 on 9 products and Time And Tru’s 15 ranking on 14 products.

Another point of contrast was Micheal Kors (Handbags) cross-retailer platform performance - its average ranking of 184 on 102 products on Macy’s while its average ranking on New Egg was 20 across 12 products. Still, it appears the brand discounted heavily in New Egg to compensate for its relatively low visibility on the website.

Ray Ban recorded a category high ranking of 209 based on 321 products on Macy’s. By comparison, Ray Ban had a ranking of 17 on 34 products at New Egg. Over at Amazon, Ray Ban managed a creditable 189 ranking on 124 products and a 163 ranking on 120 products at Bloomingdale’s.

Brands With Highest Growth in Visibility

Compared to the Electronics category, Fashion consists of certain brands that skyrocketed in their visibility. Examples include Next Level T-shirts (Amazon 2,000%), Michael Kors Watches (Walmart 1,424%), Dakota Watches (Target 751%) and Adidas sports shoes (Amazon 516%).

Bloomingdale’s delivered amazing visibility growth for key brands, with Burberry (527%), Reiss (500%), The Kooples (%00%), Tory Burch (500%), J Brand (475%), and Adidas (300%) all enjoying strong visibility growth.

At the other end of the visibility growth spectrum, the growth rates of Lucky shirts (New Egg, 11%), Micheal Kors (New Egg, 20%) Dickies jeans (Target, 22%), Tasso Elba shirts (Macy’s, 23%), and Puma Casual Shoes (Target, 25%) indicate a relatively more static assortment in their respective product types.

Depth Of Product Range And Discounting Strategy Matters

Across the three sales, DataWeave identified several different additional discounting and product assortment strategies by both the retailers and the brands.

While retailers are increasingly discounting the lower priced products to shape price perceptions among shoppers (take a bow Amazon), what are the implications for brands? Firstly, a thin product range is going to make achieving visibility more challenging. Secondly, brand strategies across online retailing platforms will need to be more clearly defined and executed. Thirdly, those brands that treated Thanksgiving, Black Friday and Cyber Monday as discrete events are going to have to rethink their approach as these lines increasingly blur with time.

If you’re interested to learn more about how DataWeave aggregates and analyzes data from online sources as massive scale, as well as how we provide competitive intelligence to retailers and consumer brands, visit our website!

January 10, 2019
Consumer Electronics Prices During the Holidays

Consumer electronics has always been one of the most popular product categories for consumers during the Thanksgiving weekend sale each year.

Shoppers often hold off on making expensive purchases in electronics in anticipation of great discounts during these sale events. While Cyber Monday is traditionally the key day for offers in electronics, recent trends, triggered by the growth of eCommerce, lean toward offering attractive prices across the entire sale weekend.

Studies indicate that in 2018, the average value of an online transaction hit $97. This compares with $91 in 2017 and $87 in 2016, continuing the trend of a steadily increasing transaction value over the past two years. This year, the scene was set for a massive Cyber Monday as Black Friday purchases of electronics reached $6.22 billion, up 23.6 percent from last year according to Adobe Analytics.

At DataWeave, we recently analyzed and published a blog post on the Thanksgiving weekend sale for the Fashion vertical.

(Read here: A Study of Fashion Retail Pricing Across Thanksgiving, Black Friday and Cyber Monday 2018)

As part of the same project, we scrutinized the consumer electronics vertical just as keenly across top electronics retailers in the US by monitoring prices across the weekend.

Our Methodology

We tracked the pricing of the 5 leading retailers selling consumer electronics to assess their pricing and product strategies during the sale events. Our analysis focused on additional discounts offered during the sale to evaluate the true value the sale event represented to customers. To calculate this effect, we compared the pricing of products on Thanksgiving Day, Black Friday and Cyber Monday to the pricing of products prior to the sale commencing. We considered the Top 500 ranked products on 11 popular product types in carrying out this analysis.

Key Findings

In contrast to the Fashion category, the consistency in the discounting strategy for all retailers across the three sale days in the Consumer Electronics category was striking. The only exception was Walmart, which opted somewhat curiously to roll back its discounts on Cyber Monday. All other retailers held similar additional discounts levels on a fairly similar set of products through the sale weekend.

Target and Best Buy led the electronics discount charge at 22% and 21% for 18% and 17% of their assortment, respectively.

While Amazon discounted the highest number of products at 29% of its range, it continued its recent strategy of not discounting steeply. In fact, Amazon was among the lowest in terms of additional discounts. The other end of the spectrum, Walmart provided a 28% additional discount on the first two sale days, offered only on a modest range of products (4% and 1%).

Headphones and USB Drives proved popular lead product types for discounting by all retailers. Other product types making the cut included Refrigerators (Target), Laptops (Walmart), and Wearable Technology (Newegg).

Amazon’s discounting strategy appears to be informed significantly by product visibility. The highest ranked products were far more aggressively discounted, and the discounts reduced progressively as we move to less visible products. This supports previous evidence illuminating Amazon’s strategy to develop a low price perception. We saw a similar trend emerging from Best Buy and Newegg as well.

This discounting approach is in stark contrast to the behavior we witnessed in our earlier analysis of the Fashion category, where we found little correlation between visibility and discounts. However, given the higher price points and greater price elasticity in the Electronics category, we were not surprised to see this level of strategic clarity. Interestingly, our analysis of Target’s discounting behavior showed an opposite trend as Target opted to load up discounts on its less visible products.

Walmart was excluded from this part of our study due to the very low number of common products before and during the sale that we could analyze.

Another stable trend which emerged during our analysis of the sale weekend is the consistency with which lower priced products are offered at higher additional discounts relative to the more premium, higher priced products in the retailers’ product type. This trend largely held across retailers. Customer perceptions of low prices can be built by heavily discounting products at the lower end of the premium spectrum, while retailers can harvest their critical margin on their higher value goods.

Diving Deeper Into Amazon

Amazon announced a few days ago that it had its biggest shopping day in the company’s history on Cyber Monday. In its announcement, the company also stated the five shopping days starting with Thanksgiving and continuing through to Cyber Monday shattered records as US consumers bought millions of more products over the five-day sales compared with the same sales period last year.

When the product popularity was evaluated and compared with additional discounts, we see higher discounts for better-reviewed products on Thanksgiving and Black Friday. Cyber Monday was an exception where discounts were distributed more smoothly across the three popularity bands.

As with what we witnessed in the Fashion category, we detected higher additional discounts in Amazon’s Electronics private label brands (17%) relative to the average discount for other brands (7%).

Profitability is back in the spotlight

Electronics continued to be a key focus eCommerce retailers during their pivotal sales events in 2018. We are seeing signs of a shift to eCommerce and an accelerating emergence of a “Black November” and a “Cyber Post-Thanksgiving Weekend” impacting on sales results for the beginning of the holiday season.

This year, there was a more concerted and strategic approach by retailers to maximize margin in the high-value end of the Electronics Category while still discounting the more popular and lower priced products. As expected, both Target and Best Buy featured prominently with their heavy discounting, while both Amazon and Newegg appeared to be executing a more nuanced discounting strategy. This rather reserved approach to the sale and careful focus on profitability is backed up by recent reports of Amazon’s shift in approach to housing low margin products.

As was the case with the Fashion category, we saw the importance of Cyber Monday for Electronics sales being eroded and spread across the entire weekend, on the backdrop of a larger trend of attractive offers encompassing much of November and December.

If you would like to know more about how DataWeave aggregates data from online sources to deliver actionable insights to retailers and consumer brands, check out our website!

December 21, 2018
A Study of Fashion Retail Pricing Across Thanksgiving, Black Friday and Cyber Monday 2018

The biggest holiday sale event of the western retail calendar — the Thanksgiving weekend sale, which includes Thanksgiving Day, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday — came and went a few weeks ago and made a huge splash along the way. While the sale event, especially Black Friday, is traditionally an offline sale event, modern online retailers too step up to offer products at attractive prices through this period.

Online retail sales numbers grew at an impressive clip based on stats reported by Adobe Analytics. Thanksgiving Day sale itself generated $3.7 billion in sales, up 28 percent from a year ago. Black Friday delivered a record $6.22 billion in online sales — a substantial leap of 23.6 percent year on year. Cyber Monday sales online generated a new record of $7.9 billion, up nearly 18 percent from last year.

Spending on fashion specifically was up 5.4 percent over the 2018 Black Friday weekend, the best growth seen since 2011, according to consulting firm Customer Growth Partners. Apparel retailers now book nearly a quarter of their annual sales during these holiday sales — a measure of just how important these annual sales have become to the online retailer’s commercial performance.

As a provider of Competitive Intelligence as a Service to retailers and consumer brands, DataWeave consistently monitors and captures pricing and assortment information from leading retailer websites during sale events to study their product and pricing strategies — and we’ve done the same for this year’s Thanksgiving weekend sale as well.

Our Methodology

We tracked the pricing of 6 leading fashion retailers to study their pricing and product strategies during the sale events. Our analysis focused on additional discounts offered during the sale to evaluate the true value of the sale event to customers. To calculate this effect, we compared the pricing of products on Thanksgiving Day, Black Friday and Cyber Monday to the pricing of products prior to the sale commencing. We considered the Top 500 ranked products on 15 product types across Men’s and Women’s Fashion for this analysis.

Key Findings in Men’s Fashion

Macy’s and Bloomingdale’s featured prominently among the top discounting retailers. This is unsurprising, given their focus on Fashion. Macy’s, in particular, additionally discounted just over half its fashion assortment over the three days. This was an order of magnitude greater than its nearest competitor Amazon at 29 percent.

Target and Walmart too discounted aggressively on Thanksgiving and Black Friday. Target exceeded Macy’s by 2 percentage points. However, Target and Walmart rolled back their discounts on Cyber Monday effectively halving them.

Walmart’s discount strategy displayed significant variation across the 3 days of sale. On Black Friday, Walmart led the retailing pack with its 46 percent discount only to roll back to 15% on Cyber Monday. The fluctuations in these discounts reflect significant variation and churn in Walmart’s Top 500 ranked products across the three days of sales.

As we have seen in previous sales, Amazon was a model of consistency in its discount strategy across the three days, maintaining a healthy 15% — 16% on roughly a third of its assortment. Strikingly, Newegg elected not to compete too aggressively in Fashion this year, adopting high single digit discounts on a similar percentage of its products.

Across all six retailers, Shirts, Jeans, and T-shirts proved to be the most popular product types in terms of additional discounts although accessories such as sunglasses (Newegg) and watches (Macy’s) broke up apparel’s dominance.

Did additional discounts vary by price range?

We also studied the variation of discounts across ranges of product “premiumness”. We generated a percentile scale based on price ranges of products from before the sale, and studied the additional discounts offered for products in these price range buckets during the sale. A percentile score or 1 is the cheapest product and 100 is the most expensive product. All of these metrics were calculated first at a product type level and then aggregated at an overall level for each retailer.

Amazon and Target display a clear strategy to additionally discount their more affordable range of products – those in the 1–20 cluster.

Bloomingdale’s showed a less structured strategic approach. Its additional discounts were largely spread evenly across levels. Its product churn among the Top 500 items during the sale focused on its more expensive products as indicated by its score of 0 for the 81–100 percentile bracket.

Macy’s opted to discount even more evenly across the board than Bloomingdale’s. It’s likely Macy’s relied on a different lever to drive discounts strategically. Walmart’s pricing approach was markedly uneven and all over the board from a strategic perspective.

Key Findings in Women’s Fashion

One of the most interesting patterns to emerge from these sale events was the marked difference in discounting strategy adopted for Women’s Fashion compared to Men’s Fashion. Both Amazon and Macy’s discounted their Women’s Fashion line up far less aggressively than their Men’s Fashion products. Their discounts also applied to a smaller set of products.

Bloomingdale’s Women’s Fashion discounting was similarly marginally less aggressive than its approach to its Men’s Fashion. Only Target’s pricing remained consistent across its Men’s and Women’s Fashion products. However, Newegg’s strategy of not engaging too aggressively in Men’s Fashion this year carried over to its treatment of Women’s Fashion.

The top product types additionally discounted were also not unexpectedly different between the Men’s and Women’s Fashion products. Skirts, Shoes, and Tops emerged as the favorite product types to discount, although no two retailers had the same discounting emphasis.

As with Women’s Fashion, Amazon and Target discounted their less expensive products more consistently. However, in Women’s Fashion, they were joined by Walmart and to a lesser degree, Newegg.

This showed evidence of a strategy to retail the less expensive products at more attractive price points to generate the price perception of being low-priced. Meanwhile, they continued to harvest comparatively more margin through their more expensive products. This was a more nuanced approach to margin management than what we saw in Men’s Fashion.

Does product visibility correlate with discounts?

One working hypothesis is that products discounted heavily tend to have higher visibility to drive the perception of lower price. However, the results of our analysis appear counter-intuitive.

Amazon’s additional discounts in Men’s Fashion appear relatively uniform across all product cohorts. In fact, Amazon’s peaked additional discounts with the 200–400 cohort.

Similar trends surfaced with other retailers. Newegg additionally discounted its longer tail products, while Walmart additionally discounted its Top 50 products at only 16% compared to an average of around 23% for other cohorts in its Top 500.

A closer look at Amazon.com

(Read Also: Amazon’s US Fashion and Apparel Product Assortment Evolves)

We extracted data on Amazon’s reviews and ratings to investigate its discounting strategy across ranges of product popularity — a measure that’s defined using a combination of average review rating and number of reviews. We compiled a measure of all products that were rated as High, Medium, and Low cohorts and evaluated Amazon’s discounting strategy in each cohort.

In Men’s Fashion, Amazon aggressively discounted its Medium and Low rated products on Thanksgiving, only to switch its strategy the next day on Black Friday. This tactical switch was presumably intended to showcase Amazon’s well-reviewed products at attractive prices on Black Friday — a larger sale event.

By Cyber Monday, Amazon’s Medium reviewed products were back enjoying more aggressive discount levels, albeit the discount variance across all three cohorts was minor.

Amazon’s discounting strategy for its Men’s Fashion products was in stark contrast to its strategy in Women’s Fashion. Here, Amazon additionally discounted its High and Medium reviewed products on Thanksgiving. While there was no specific discernible pattern on Black Friday, Amazon’s discounting was most consistent across its three popularity cohorts on Cyber Monday.

We also looked at Amazon’s discounting activity across its private label products relative to other brands. Unsurprisingly, Amazon discounted its private label fashion products at an aggressive 30%, while the other brands benefited from, on average across all days and all categories, an additional 15% discount.

Online drives shifting tides in holiday sale events

While traditionally the holiday shopping season sees a peak around Black Friday and Christmas, retailers are increasingly seeing the demand spread across the entirety of the sale season of November and December. As a result, retailers need to stay on their toes to drive increased sales and gain market share over an extended period of time.

Certainly, in 2018, we witnessed a more focused approach to mine margins in Women’s Fashion while still discounting aggressively. As expected, both Macy’s and Bloomingdale’s featured prominently in the discounting stakes while both Amazon and Target appeared to implement a more nuanced approach to juggling a reputation for low prices and driving increased margin.

If you’re curious about how DataWeave aggregates data from eCommerce data at massive to deliver actionable insights to retailers and consumer brands, check us out on our website!

December 20, 2018
Decoding Alibaba’s Singles Day Sales

An average of $11.7 million per second was the rate at which Alibaba clocked $1 billion in sales during the first 85 seconds of Singles’ Day. As Alibaba’s annual sale event continues to grow in scale, referring to it as a global retail phenomenon is an understatement. Alibaba closed the day having shipped 1.04 billion express packages based on sales of merchandize worth 213.5 billion yuan ($30.67 billion).

This performance shredded any lingering concerns analysts may have harbored about the prospects of this year’s sale, given the international backdrop of the ongoing trade skirmish between the US and China.

Along with attractive discounts across a range of product categories, Singles’ Day also promised an integrated experience fusing entertainment, digital and shopping, in stark contrast to other large global sale events like Black Friday, which focus predominantly on discounts.

At DataWeave, we set out to investigate if all the hype resulted in actual price benefits to the shoppers and how the various categories and brands performed in terms of sales during the event. To do this, we leveraged our proprietary data aggregation and analysis platform to capture a range of diverse data points on Tmall Global, covering unit sales (reported by the website) and pricing associated with Tmall Global’s major categories over the Singles’ Day period.

Our Methodology

We captured 5 separate snapshots of data from Tmall.com during the period between October 25 and November 14, encompassing over 15,000 unique products each time, across 15 product categories.

To calculate the average discount rate, we considered the percentage difference between the maximum retail price and the available price of each product. We also looked at the additional discount rate, for which we compared the available price during Singles’ Day to the available price from before the sale. This metric reflects the truest value to the shopper during Singles’ Day in terms of price.

Our AI-powered technology platform is also capable of capturing prices embedded in an image. For example, the offer price of ¥4198 was extracted accurately from the accompanying image by our algorithms and attributed as the available price while ¥100 from the same image was ignored.

This technology was employed across hundreds of products using DataWeave’s proprietary Computer Vision technology.

Domestic Appliances and Digital/Computer Categories Powered Turnover

The Domestic Appliances and Digital/Computer categories dominated the Singles Day Sale in terms of absolute sales turnover. This isn’t surprising, since the average order value for these categories are typically much higher compared to the other categories analyzed.

What clearly stands out in the above infographic is that the two largest categories in terms of sales turnover had average additional discounts of only 2 per cent and 0 per cent — a rather surprising insight. In general, with the exceptions of Women’s skincare, Men’s skincare, and Women’s bags (11 per cent, 10 per cent, and 9 per cent respectively), all other categories saw low additional discounts during Singles’ Day.

However, the absolute discounts across the board were consistently high, with only Luggage (6 per cent), Digital/Computer (9 per cent) and Women’s wear (12 per cent) staying significantly below the 20 per cent mark. In fact, eight categories enjoyed absolute discounts greater than 30 per cent.

Among common categories between Men and Women, the Men clocked more sales in Men’s wear, shoes, and bags. Only skincare proved to be an exception, where Women’s skincare generated twice the turnover of their Men’s equivalent.

The Infants category was another intriguing sector to emerge during the sale. Both Diapers (38 per cent) and Infant’s Formula (25 per cent) were substantially discounted, despite only receiving low additional discounts of 2 per cent and 0 per cent respectively – indicating aggressive pricing strategies in this category even during non-sale time periods.

The biggest takeaway from our analysis is the lack of any correlation between sales turnover and additional discounts, or even the absolute discounts.

International Brands Make Gains

International brands continue to penetrate the Chinese market showing up amongst the Top 5 brands of 13 of the 16 categories on sale.

In the Diaper category, Pampers delivered nearly twice the sales turnover of its next biggest competitor. As expected, Apple and Huawei battled it out for honors in the Digital/Computer category although Xiaomi enjoyed pleasing results, nearly matching Huawei’s sales to go with its sales leadership of the Domestic Appliances category. Local brands, though, swept the Domestic Appliances, Furniture and Women’s Wear categories.

The challenge posed by Chinese brands was illustrated by Nike’s spot in the second place in the highly competitive Men’s Shoes category after Anta.

International brands topped only five of the 16 categories and Top 3 positions in ten categories. Still, there’s a growing presence of international brands in China’s eCommerce.

Gillette won handsomely over its competition in the Personal Care category while Skechers enjoyed a similar result in Women’s Shoes, racking up nearly twice the retail sales of its nearest competitor. Another category dominated by international brands was the Women’s Cosmetics category where international brands accounted for 4 of the Top 5 brands.

Similarly, Samsonite’s acquisition of American Tourister gave it two top 5 brands in the Luggage category. Other global brands to make the cut during the Singles’ Day sale included L’Oréal, Canada’s Hershel, Playboy, South Korea’s Innisfree and Japan’s Uniqlo.

It’s Not All About Price On Singles’ Day

The dramatic rise in shopping during Singles’ Day is not driven solely by price reductions. Alibaba’s commitment to its “New Retail” strategic model has led the Chinese giant to channel its impressive resources to focus on bringing together the online elements of its business with the more traditional offline aspects of its retail distribution. This is combined with entertainment to create a larger story based around the shopper’s overall “experience” rather than just driving “attractive prices” as a short-term retail hook.

Alibaba is betting big on erasing the line between online and offline and its futuristic vision of structuring retail around the way people actually want to shop. Based on the consistently impressive results of Singles’ Day year after year, “New Retail” has a promising future.

If you wish to know more about how DataWeave aggregates data from online sources to provide actionable insights to retailers and consumer brands, check out our website!

December 12, 2018
Inside India’s eCommerce Battle: Attractive Offers Usher In The Festive Season

It’s festival season in India again and shoppers took advantage of aggressive cutthroat competition between Indian online retailers to drive sales to unprecedented highs.

All the major Indian eCommerce websites including, Amazon, Flipkart, Myntra, and Shopclues opted to go head to head by holding their first sale event this season over 4 to 5 days starting on the 10th of October. Still, as industry reports indicate, one retailer came out on top during this event — an insight supported by our analysis as well.

A New Battleground

The highlight this year was seeing how the announcement of global retail colossus Walmart’s acquisition of Flipkart would impact the sale events. The acquisition was the most influential development in India’s eCommerce sector, and it has transported a decades-long U.S. rivalry between Amazon and Walmart to Indian soil. As a result, this year’s sale event held out the promise of more attractive pricing and vast product selection for India’s consumers than ever before.

Industry analysts estimate that the sale generated a cumulative Rs 15,000 crore in sales over the spread of the five sale days, a whopping outcome. In 2018, this translated into around a 64 per cent year-on-year growth outcome compared to the USD 1.4 billion (around Rs 10,325 crore) generated by the 2017 sales.

The DataWeave Analysis

At DataWeave, we analyzed the performance of each of the major eCommerce platforms including Amazon, Flipkart, Myntra, Paytm, and Shopclues. For each eCommerce website, we aggregated data on the Top 500 ranked products for over 40 product types spread across 6 product categories (Electronics, Men’s & Women’s Fashion, Furniture, Haircare, Skincare).

We focused our analysis on only the additional discounts offered during the sale and compared them to prices prior to the sale, to reflect the true value of the sale to India’s shoppers.

The battle of the discounts was led primarily by Flipkart and Amazon. Flipkart’s average additional discounts by category actually exceeded Amazon’s in three out of six categories, and it discounted more products that Amazon across all categories.

Clearly, the focus for all e-tailers was skewed towards the main battlegrounds of Electronics and Fashion, compared to mainstream FMCG categories such as Hair and Skin Care. However, this is not surprising given FMCG functions on rather skinny margins.

Across retailers, the Men’s and Women’s Fashion categories were the most aggressively discounted, attracting both the highest additional discounts and the highest percentage of products with additional discounts.

The Furniture category too was an interesting battleground between Amazon and Flipkart, attracting attractive discounts on a wide range of products, particularly in Flipkart’s case.

Prospective shoppers in search of relatively more expensive clothing products on discount during the sale would have established Myntra as their ideal destination, as it carried more premium products on discount during the sale, relative to all its competitors. For shoppers in search of an electronics bargain though, they would have done well to opt for Flipkart.

Shoppers may have found some interesting deals on Paytm Mall too, especially in Men’s Fashion, while Shopclues largely held itself back from any dramatic price reductions.

While Myntra capitalized on its niche though aggressive discounting in the Fashion category, most of the discounting action revolved unsurprisingly around Amazon and Flipkart. To drill down for a more complete understanding of just how the Amazon and Flipkart discounted their products, we conducted a more detailed follow-on analysis.

We normalized additional discounts and popularity using a scale of 1 to 10 and plotted each product on a chart to analyze its distribution characteristics. Popularity was calculated as a combination of the average review rating and the number of reviews posted. Products with a popularity score of zero, as well as zero additional discounts were excluded from this analysis.

The most obvious insight yield through this analysis is how Flipkart elected to distribute its additional discounts across a larger range of discount percentages. By contrast, Amazon went all in on the more limited range of products it decided to provide additional discounts on. This is a strategy we have seen Amazon adopt previously.

One other intriguing insight is Flipkart’s decision to go for a much higher distribution of products falling below a popularity score of 0.5 compared to Amazon. Amazon’s strategy resulted in more of its discounted products having a higher popularity score, relative to Flipkart, albeit only by a comparatively minor amount. However, a shopper’s chances of buying a popular, positively reviewed product at a lower price were higher on Amazon than Flipkart during this sale.

Achieving a Consistent Competitive Edge

Flipkart claims to have recorded a 70 per cent plus share of entire Indian e-commerce market in the 4 day-BBD’18 sales. Flipkart further claimed to have cornered an 85 per cent share in the online Fashion category together with a 75 per cent share in the Electrical category’s large appliances during the sale. This includes a contribution by Flipkart’s subsidiary Myntra.

As these numbers reflect, Amazon still has some way to go to entrench itself in the Fashion category of the Indian market. However, Amazon appears content to continue its surgical discounting philosophy.

Overall, this year witnessed an impressive participation by Tier II and Tier III Indian city consumers — a sign of things to come in Indian online retail.

With increasing competitive pressure, retailers simply cannot adopt discounting and product selection strategies in isolation and be successful. Having access to up to date insights on competitors’ products dynamically during the day is emerging as key to ensuring they’re able to sustain their lowest priced strategy for appropriate products. These insights are also proving critical in identifying gaps in their product assortment, which can hamper customer conversion and retention.

During sale events, modern retailers need to rely on highly granular competitive insights on an hourly basis (or even more frequently) to inform their pricing and product strategies to ensure they consistently maintain a competitive edge for the consumer’s wallet. And while access to reliable competitive intelligence is critical, true value can only be derived when it gets integrated with a retailer’s core business and decision-making processes, such as assortment management, promotions planning, pricing strategies, etc.

DataWeave’s Competitive Intelligence as a Service helps global retailers do just this by providing timely, accurate, and actionable competitive pricing and product insights, at massive scale. Check out our website to find out more!

November 13, 2018
Prime Day Sale: Unraveling the Highs and Lows of Amazon’s Flagship Event
Another year, another round of media frenzy, and another set of records broken.

In only three years, Amazon’s Prime Day has evolved into one of the landmark sale events of the shopper’s calendar. Reports indicate that this year’s sale made a major splash, raking in over $4.2 billion in sales — a 33% increase compared to last year. Also, the retail behemoth shipped over 100 million products during the 36-hour sale. Amazon stated that they “welcomed more new Prime members on July 16 than on any other previous day in Prime history.”

The much talked about website outage added some spice and drama to the proceedings during the first hour. However, this was fixed quickly.

This year is also the first Prime Day with Whole Foods, Amazon’s most expensive acquisition, giving US shoppers unprecedented incentives to shop at the physical stores of the grocery retailer.

However, Prime Day is not just about the US, but a truly global event. In India, as part of its promotions for Prime Day, Amazon leveraged VR to have people experience the products in their true form factor at select malls.

At DataWeave, our proprietary data aggregation and analysis platform enabled us to keep an eye on the pricing and discounts of products during the sale. We tracked Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, and Amazon.in before (14th July) and during the sale (16th July) and monitored several product types in Electronics, Men’s Fashion, Women’s Fashion and Furniture categories. We captured information on the price, brand, rank on the category page, whether Prime was offered or not, etc. and analyzed the top 200 ranks in each product type listing page. To best indicate the additional value to shoppers during the sale, we focused our analysis only on additional discounts on products between the 14th and 16th of July.

Scrutinizing the data yielded some rather interesting insights:

Amazon UK was more aggressive with its discounts than the US and India across most categories, with Furniture being the only exception (highest discounts in the US).

In the US, Women’s Fashion observed the steepest discounts (12%), though there were discounts available on a larger number of Men’s Fashion products (5% additional discount on 20% of products).

While disparity between discounts on Prime products vs non-Prime was quite evident, it was surprisingly low for many categories. In fact, the Electronics category in the UK and the Furniture category in India witnessed sharper discounts for non-Prime products than Prime.

Top categories by additional discount include Women’s Handbags, Sports Shoes, and Pendrives in the US, Sunglasses and Tablets in the UK, and Women’s Tops, Men’s Jeans, Women’s Sunglasses, and Refrigerators in India. Top brands include Nike, Amazon Essentials, Sandisk, and 1home in the US, Oakley, Toshiba, Belledorm, and rfiver in the UK, and Adidas, Sony, UCB, and Red Tape in India.

As indicated in the following infographic, some of the most discoverable brands during the sale include Canon, Apple, Nike and Casio in the US, Sandisk, Amazon, Levi’s, and Ray Ban in the UK, and Nikon, UCB, Whirlpool, and HP in India. Discoverability here is measured as a combination of the number of the brand’s products in the top 100 ranks and the average rank of all products of the brand. Also in the infographic, is a set of products with high additional discounts during the sale.

Amazon’s competitors though aren’t ones that simply roll with the punches.

Flipkart, Amazon’s largest competitor in India (recently acquired by Walmart), announced its own Big Shopping Days sale between July 16 and July 19. On Prime Day, the company joined in with some attractive offers:
- 8%, 10%, and 7% additional discounts on 11%, 29%, and 16% of Electronics, Men’s Fashion, and Women’s Fashion categories, respectively.
- 35% off on Perfect Homes 3-seater Sofa
- 27% additional discount on Acer Predator Helios Gaming Laptop
- 25% additional discount on Sandisk 16GB Pen Drive
Propelling the Amazon Flywheel

While Amazon clearly benefits in the short-term with this sale, the long-term effect of feeding its famous flywheel is evident as well.

Amazon’s flywheel is a framework through which the company looks to build a self-feeding platform that accelerates growth over time. Attractive discounts and a broad selection of products improves customer experience, which increases traffic to the website, which attracts more merchants on its platform, who in turn broaden the selection of available products.

Sale events like Prime Day create the sort of hype needed to draw a lot of traffic to Amazon’s website, generating momentum that has a compounding effect on Amazon’s growth. Not surprisingly, more than half of the people surveyed in the US by Cowen last December said they lived in a household with at least one Prime subscription.

As Amazon’s stock traded at an all time high following Prime Day, it’s only a matter of time before the company becomes the world’s first trillion dollar company.

Check us out, if you’re interested in learning more about our technology and how we provide Competitive Intelligence as a Service to retailers and consumer brands.
July 30, 2018
Clearance Sale Analysis: Retailing Woes Stagger H&M and Toys “R” Us

Confidence amongst retailing analysts was rocked last month by two successive announcements.

H&M’s most recent quarterly report, which revealed it had accumulated over $4.3 billion in unsold inventory, shocked retail analysts. In an era of on-the-fly inventory replenishment where stocks are closely matched to sales, a spike in unsold inventory is a strong indicator of trouble ahead. The news left analysts questioning H&M’s competitiveness in the fiercely contested global apparel category, where ever-changing consumer preferences demand agility in managing inventory levels.

In the other major announcement, Toys “R” Us officially closed its doors to shoppers. The retailer’s losses continued to pile up and the chain groaned under a mountain of debt, leaving it little choice but to close down. “The stark reality is that the (chain is) projected to run out of cash in the U.S. in May,” it said in its bankruptcy filing.

While the emergence of the online shopping phenomenon hasn’t helped Toys “R” Us, its ongoing afflictions largely reflect strategic missteps that predated the online shopping boom. In a category where the shopping experience is all, the retailer failed to adapt to changing consumer expectations. The warehouse context which shaped the retailing did little to promote toys sales or communicate the sheer breadth of inventory carried by Toys “R” Us.

So, as Toys “R” Us begins to wind down its operations, the company has shuttered its online store and is channeling customers to its remaining physical retail outlets. However, prior to the closure, shoppers enjoyed some amazing bargains during their clearance sale.

H&M’s problems appear less terminal. Its management claim to have implemented a strategy to slash its accumulated inventory and reign in its aggressive store expansion strategy.

At DataWeave, we leveraged our proprietary data aggregation and analysis platform to analyze the clearance sales of both H&M and Toys “R” Us. We tracked the pricing, product categories, discounts, review ratings, stock status and more between 29-Mar and 3-Apr.

The Toys “R” Us Sale

Although the dolls and stuffed animals category carried the most products, its average discount was along the mid-range point for the sale at 28 percent. Games & Puzzles and Action Figures and NERF were the most heavily discounted categories at 40 percent and 36 percent respectively.

As anticipated, products with lower review ratings were sold at slightly higher discounts. However, even exclusive products were sold at comparatively high discounts. Not surprising, given this was effectively a clearance sale.

Hasbro, Mattel, and Spin Master were the highest represented brands during the sale, while for their part, Kid’s Furniture and Outdoor Play had fewer products participating in the sale. Other popular brands such as Fisher-Price and LEGO had a presence during the sale but offered fewer products.

Zuru was the most aggressive in offering discounts with Spin Master the least aggressive. The remaining brands offered discounts of between 30 and 36 percent.

Reports suggest that last year, toymakers Mattel and Hasbro each sold around $1 billion worth of their toys at Walmart, more than the volume they achieved selling through Toys “R” Us. Strategically, these leading brands seem to have their bases covered even though Toys “R” Us is closing down.

Interestingly, some products were seen to go out of stock during the sale week, only to be replenished a day later, as illustrated in the above infographic.

The H&M Sale

Overall, H&M’s clearance sale was more aggressive in Women’s Apparel with three times more products on offer than for Men’s Apparel. However, there wasn’t much difference between the two in terms of the discounts on offer which hovered around the 45 percent range. Women’s Tops, Cardigan’s and Sweaters offered discounts on the most products during the sale period.

Little difference was observed tactically, between how the different product categories, were handled.

We saw a significant movement of products in Women’s apparel during the week, with over 330 newly added products and close to 200 products that were effectively churned. This pattern indicates H&M achieved a faster shelf velocity for this category than for Men’s, possibly due to a more aggressive approach to the selection of items on sale.

Customer focus is key

Reports indicate that despite a series of widespread and aggressive markdowns as shown in the analysis above, H&M is struggling to sell off its mountain of accumulated merchandise. Changing consumer tastes and increasing competition seem to have taken their toll on the once agile Swedish retailer. If it is going to weather this storm, H&M needs to revisit its fast fashion approach to assortment and inventory management. The retailer would also appear to need to improve its demand forecasting expertise.

The bankruptcy filing by Toys “R” Us presents yet another lesson for eCommerce and bricks-and-mortar retailers alike, to address evolving consumer expectations and focus closely on the customer experience aspect of their business, which are supported by appropriate pricing and product assortment strategies.

At DataWeave, our technology platform enables retailers to do just that, through comprehensive and timely insights on competitive pricing, promotions, and product assortment. Check out our website to find out more!

April 30, 2018