Adobe Digital Insights has released its latest monthly Digital Economy Project presentation covering July 2017. These reports look at various elements of the economy: one that caught our eye is a measure of “shifting consumer preferences,” demonstrating how beholden certain categories are to continuously releasing new products.
The report outlines the percentage of online spending, per category, that goes to new products. In this case, new products are defined as items with a unique identifier (such as an SKU) that have been available for 1 year or less.
The apparel category – the #1 retail e-commerce category by spend – is the most heavily dependent on new products. More than 80% of online spending on apparel is for items that have been available for purchase for 1 year or less, per the report. Electronics (also a top e-commerce category) is close behind, with more than three-quarters of online spend for new products.
Appliances seem to have a slightly longer shelf life, as just under half (47.1%) of online spend for these items goes to newer products.
One of the interesting findings relates to grocery. Currently, e-commerce accounts for just 3% of grocery spending, but at the same time is powering 80% of grocery dollar sales growth.
Adobe’s analysis shows that some 16.8% of online grocery spending in July was for new products. That was the lowest share of the 11 categories, save for non-prescription drugs (14.3%).
One potential reason why? People are very selective with the grocery products they buy. In an analysis released a few years ago, Nielsen Catalina Solutions found that the average grocery shopper buys less than 1% of available items over the course of a year. On a quarterly basis, shoppers purchased an average of just 83 items (0.23% of those available) while on a weekly basis they bought just 13 different items (0.04%). In fact, no two of the 32 million shoppers analyzed bought the same array of products over the course of the year.
About the Data: The Adobe Digital Insights measures 80% of all transactions from the top 100 US retailers, and 75% of all dollars spent online with the top 500 US retailers. The data is based on an analysis of 15 billion website visits and 2.2 million products sold online.
