One of the advantages of running a high performing affiliate network across around 2,000 (and rapidly rising) advertiser programmes trading a 30 million+ strong fully indexed product database is that we have a pretty good balanced view of what is going on in the world on online retail and e-commerce at any one time. Here we run through some interesting top line findings from these past few unprecedented weeks.

2020 Lens #1 x Vertical

The chart below shows how groups of these programmes have been performing since 1st January 2020 through to the present day; when analysed across the vertical groups of retailers and products they are trading. The lines where the red dots are on the right of the green dots shows the impacted sectors with the opposite indicating those where trading is strongest, with a marked change since the Europe-wide lockdowns started happening and the end of March 2020

Biggest Fallers

Given these recent locked down times, it’s unsurprising to see that in the Travel sector, whilst impressions and clicks have remained fairly robust during the peak booking season, completed transactions simply evaporated almost immediately as people become unable or unwilling to travel and the travel companies themselves were forced to cancel available inventory. The other heavily impacted vertical is Financial Services as organisations close their lending books to new customers; this despite a large increase in impressions and no real decline in clicks.

The Lockdown Leaders

On the other hand we can see that clear ‘winners’ among the Webgains portfolio during these times are Electronics & Mobile sectors [as people rapidly moved to work from home]; Gambling and Gaming [more people with free time], Information Services [News subscriptions and Online Learning] and Utilities [as shoppers look to improve their energy deals whilst at home] then on another level or growth entirely are Fashion, Health and Beauty [since the closure of the High Street hasn’t ended overall demand simply switched online] and Home & Garden [a combination of food self-sufficiency as well as garden furniture and equipment].

2020 Lens #2 x Product Category

Next, we can look at another set of highly interesting indicative data*. Thanks to recent cutting edge technical advances involving Webgains’ Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning team we have been exclusively able to fully map and categorise our 33 million strong product database (and rising very fast!!) on top of around 350 categories and subcategories in the Google GTIN taxonomy. The results can be seen below when we see how the share of transactions sold across the Webgains network of affiliates has been split between last 30, 14, 7 and 1 days (of lockdown) compared to the period beforehand (90 days ago) and are dominated by just four; House and Garden, Sport & Hobbies, Toys & Games and Books.

It’s easy to understand the dominance of these four categories. With the entire travel and leisure sector mothballed (or worse) consumer demand has switched to keeping fit, decorating our homes, planting our gardens and improving our digital connectivity.

It will be highly interesting to see how this vertical industry and product mix maintains as we move through the next days weeks and even perhaps months of the COVID-19 pandemic. Thanks to our latest product and business insight innovations Webgains has several new cutting edge discovery and ‘demand navigation’ tools exclusively available to our network members in order to help them best navigate these treacherous times. Please contact your account lead or the affiliate team for more information on these are they move out of our beta development and into our platform interfaces.

Of course, if you haven’t yet joined Webgains as an advertiser or an affiliate please get in touch and we will show you exactly how Webgains Gives You The Edge! We offer industry best 100% platform uptime, unbeatable service response times, 100% ITP and GDPR compliant tracking methods, 30-day programme launch target and exclusive affiliate access, fast pay-outs and product deals.

Until then, please take care and stay safe.

[*Please note: These datasets have filtered adult and erotic products; “-” denotes “other”]