With the continued global lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic, businesses have mostly ground to a halt. Economists and entrepreneurs alike have to make do with what’s available at the moment, which includes data that can be gathered from this situation. Here’s where CCinsight comes into play to help your Amazon Business.
That data can then help decision-makers understand what steps need to be taken next. That’s why a new COVID-19 Commerce Insight project was launched last March 31 to collect data on how the pandemic has been affecting consumer behavior and confidence.
The extraordinary measures being undertaken by governments around the world to combat the disease must be matched by extraordinary measures by industry to keep economies upright.
What is CCinsight?
COVID-19 Commerce Insight, or CCinsight, is an online commerce tracker that was created by Emarsys, one of the largest independent marketing platforms in the world. It’s an unprecedented project in both scale and objective that was developed to see how the COVID-19 pandemic is affecting online consumer behavior.
Customer expenditures across different industries at both global and regional levels are tracked to understand how a crisis of such a global scale is affecting commerce. It will show how much various industries have been impacted by the drastic measures that had to be taken to combat the COVID-19 pandemic.
The data gathered by CCinsight won’t only serve as metrics for business owners to understand how to react to such an extreme scenario. Those numbers will also chronicle how people have reacted in this trying time, which will serve valuable lessons in history down the line.
How Does CCinsight Work?
As an online commerce tracker, CCinsight works by taking data from more than 2,500 brands all over the world that Emarsys provides technology solutions to. CCinsight provides a look into more than 1 billion engagements and 400 million transactions made in more than 100 countries.
The platform takes advantage of Emarsys’ global reach, as well as data visualization technology provided by GoodData, a proud partner of Emarsys, to provide interactive data analytics that tells the grand story of how the COVID-19 pandemic is affecting businesses all over the world.
It measures economic impact in various ways.
For instance, it records the year-over-year growth rate of online transactions, which shows how eCommerce and retailers are performing over the last week compared to how they did in the same period of time just a year ago. That shows how they performed prior to the COVID-19 outbreak compared to their current situation.
It also shows year-over-year growth trends in online transactions by region and by country, comparing pre-COVID-19 outbreak performance to current performance in various parts of the world. This shows which parts of the world have been affected the most by the pandemic.
Why Do We Need CCinsight?
The COVID-19 pandemic has created a worldwide health crisis that can’t be ignored. The virulence, unpredictability, and potential lethality of the disease has put the whole world on alert, and it has affected commerce at an unprecedented degree.
Countless businesses have had to either close up shop, shorten business hours, or drastically change how they do transactions. Employees have had to either stop coming to work or have to work from home, depending on the nature of their work.
Compromises had to be made by companies while social distancing and other drastic measures had to be implemented to stem the tide of the virus. Of course, this affects how businesses are run, which then affects how they’re able to earn revenue during this period of unavoidable economic downturn.
Illustrating changes from pre-outbreak to the current situation can help businesses figure out strategies they need to undertake to both recover from this outbreak and adapt to the new normal.
No one can tell for sure whether things will ever get back to normal soon.
How Can CCinsight Help Your Amazon Business?
The COVID-19 outbreak has affected eCommerce in various ways. For one, businesses aren’t able to deliver goods as freely due to quarantine lockdowns. On the consumer side, cart abandonment rates have most likely risen in a lot of sectors, while it has dropped for some like groceries and other essential goods.
You can also see average order values (AOV) by sector, which shows what consumers are spending on at the moment compared to their usual pre-outbreak behavior. They are understandably spending more on pharmaceuticals, groceries, and retail goods while skimping on everything else.
Knowing which niches have suffered or somehow gained from this crisis can help you make decisions to adapt to your situation, thus letting your Amazon business adjust accordingly. This is especially true if you happen to be one of the businesses that have taken a blow due to the pandemic.
CCinsight As a Way to Deal with COVID-19 Economic Impact
The most obvious impact that the COVID-19 pandemic has made on businesses is the disruption of supply chains. This is especially so with China being the origin of the disease, which led to partial and full shutdowns of manufacturing and logistics in the country for a significant amount of time.
Meanwhile, the pandemic has caused conferences, conventions, and other industry events to be postponed or entirely canceled. The cancellation of major events in the technology sector has caused over $1 billion in direct losses, according to Recode citing estimates from PredictHQ.
This has resulted in countless missed opportunities for networking and partnerships between businesses and clients everywhere.
Most interactions have to be limited to online communication, which is not the same as meeting face to face.
This has created opportunities in the communications sector, wherein applications like Zoom, Skype, and Discord have seen a surge in usage. The same trend goes for video streaming services, gaming services, and other digital media outlets.
This spike in demand for remote interaction due to the COVID-19 pandemic has made it clear that technologies like 5G and other near-instantaneous communications are more necessary than ever. Their development and adoption may be hastened due to these unforeseen circumstances.
Ad spending estimates in China have gone down from $121.13 billion to $113.7 billion for 2020 due to this crisis. Meanwhile, it’s not entirely certain yet how it has affected ad spending exactly in the rest of the world, but CCinsight can help give indications of where that will most likely go.
Cashless payment methods have gone up in usage, especially due to news of the virus’ spread through physical cash. Greater adoption of cashless payment can help make eCommerce better as more people are able to pay for products and services online through electronic wallets and other such means.
CCinsight will help show if any of these trends and changes affect the bigger picture in the long run. As the global fight against COVID-19 continues, CCinsight will show how businesses are adapting, how consumers are behaving, and how money is moving during these incredibly challenging times.
Conclusion
COVID-19 Commerce Insight provides a bird’s eye view of the business world amid this worldwide crisis. There would have been much uncertainty without technology to give such a panoramic look at how the rest of the world is coping with the circumstances set by the pandemic.
And the best thing about CCinsight is its accessibility, letting everyone who is practicing social distancing and self-isolation to “flatten the curve” view its data through its website. Not only is it providing a service to businesses everywhere, but it’s also helping in the fight against the disease in its own way.
As far as business goes, CCinsight can be a major tool in recovery once this worldwide crisis starts to abate.
