In May 2021, Shein made headlines by overtaking Amazon as the number one shopping app on iOS and Android. The June announcement that Shein may IPO at a $47 billion valuation rattled public attention again. How did this Chinese app seemingly emerge out of nowhere to become the most downloaded in the U.S.? In this article, we’ll use data from our eCommerce solutions Research Intelligence and Shopper Intelligence, to analyze Shein and see if it’s truly a threat to retailers like Amazon and Walmart. Hold your breath for the Shein vs. Amazon face-off.
When many Americans sheltered in their homes early in the coronavirus pandemic, meal delivery sales reached new heights. Our data reveals that in August 2021, sales for meal delivery services grew 15 percent year-over-year, collectively. The ongoing pandemic may also be driving more Americans to make their first meal delivery purchase. In August 2021, 50 percent of U.S. consumers had ever ordered from one of the services in our analysis, up from 43 percent a year ago.
At the onset of the pandemic, working from home became the new reality. At a time when more and more employers are reopening their offices and asking their employees to go back to in-person work, we are looking at how remote job postings evolved and how it transformed the labor markets. In early 2020, the share of remote job postings quickly increased during the initial lockdowns. More interestingly, however, the trend has since continued upwards —the share of job postings that mention “remote” has increased from 1-2% pre-pandemic to 8-9% today.
It appears we’re closing the summer on a hot streak as overall job listings continued to rise in August for the 6th month in a row. While the trajectory is positive, the pace of growth continues to slow with August non-farm payroll numbers missing estimates and another increase in the number of jobs deleted in our database. This could be a sign of a broader slow-down, but we would anticipate hiring will accelerate ahead of the holiday season.
ForwardKeys’ and Dragon Trail International’s recent findings reveal that the Chinese travel market is not only super resilient but desperate for revenge travel, even if it is only within China! Dragon Trail International’s fourth Chinese Traveller Sentiment Survey found that more Chinese are resuming pre-pandemic travel behaviours, despite the persistent concern for safety. 43% of survey respondents said they would “travel cautiously,” up from 31% in Dragon Trail’s March 2021 survey.
China is one of the biggest markets for luxury worldwide. The luxury market in China has seen a healthy growth versus the same period two years ago for the first half of 2021(+107%YoY2). This acceleration continued during the first three weeks into July, but surprisingly dropped to +46% YoY2 during the last week, as seen on the chart below. Most noteworthy is the stock price drop for major luxury brands by mid-August, roughly about 10%.
For those of us in Europe it may feel like summer has come and gone and we haven’t managed to get away on holiday. Restrictions eased too late for many, and the Delta variant meant there was too much uncertainty about who would be permitted to travel, making it easier and less stressful to stay home. In a ‘normal’ year the next major holiday getaway period would be December for the Christmas and New Year break. For those seeking some sunshine in the northern hemisphere’s winter, the Caribbean can be a great destination
When we last looked into liquor store visits, foot traffic to the sector was significantly higher than it had been in 2019. A couple of months later, it looks like visits to alcohol retailers are still booming. Although the country is mostly reopened and the wider retail economy is on the rise, liquor store visits are still significantly higher than 2019 levels. Analyzing visits to three regional chains (BevMo! on the West Coast and Arizona, Spec’s in Texas, and ABC Fine Wine & Spirits in Florida) and to one national chain (Total Wine & More) reveals that retail alcohol sales are still surging.
Between Disney’s Magic Kingdom’s 50th anniversary celebration and Halloween, a season of fun activities at amusement parks was planned starting next month. Unfortunately, Delta is putting a damper on the Fall fun. Just as travel began to recover, families cancelled their plans again. How does that impact advertising trends? Disney fans were excited to return to the theme parks in California and Florida once they reopened and mask mandates were relaxed.
The travel experts at ForwardKeys were recently invited to present at the Adria Forum in Zagreb to shed additional light on the development of tourism in the Balkan region by highlighting the important role flight connectivity has in international and domestic arrivals. And the results are interesting as it reveals the savvy business approach of Croatia over the summer as well as reinforcing the future value of Tirana and Podgorica as important airport hubs into the region.
When examining the latest Air Ticketing Data for industry partner CAPA, a clear observation is that travel recovery is performing at a different pace from country to country – even if you are in the same region! “Withstanding where you are in the world, you are a winning destination showing resilience if you are smartly promoting sun and sea leisure destinations; remained open throughout the pandemic or wisely made announcements in advance of key tourism periods; kept your travel restrictions consistent and easy to follow
The rise of online grocery delivery—alongside record growth of the restaurant and convenience store delivery sectors—continues to be an area of interest for many businesses this year. Uber Eats recently announced a grocery delivery partnership with Albertsons while DoorDash also expanded in recent months, partnering with convenience stores and grocery retailers to provide delivery on top of their already existing DashPass service.
The CoreLogic Loan Performance Insights report features an interactive view of our mortgage performance analysis through June 2021. Measuring early-stage delinquency rates is important for analyzing the health of the mortgage market. To more comprehensively monitor mortgage performance, CoreLogic examines all stages of delinquency as well as transition rates that indicate the percent of mortgages moving from one stage of delinquency to the next.
The nation’s overall delinquency rate was 4.4% in June. The serious delinquency rate fell to its lowest level since May 2020. In June 2021, 4.4% of home mortgages were in some stage of delinquency (30 days or more past due, including those in foreclosure), which was a 2.7-percentage point decrease from June 2020 according to the latest CoreLogic Loan Performance Insights Report . However, overall delinquencies were still above the early 2020 pre-pandemic rate of 3.6%.
The Home & Garden Industry has been one of the fastest growing in both the UK and the US as more time at home has driven shoppers to make those spaces more comfortable. In today’s Insight Flash, see how UK and US growth compare overall as well as by channel, and which brands are growing the fastest in each geography. The Home & Garden industry has been one of the strongest in both the UK and the US in recent years, with positive consumer spend growth on a two-year basis on both sides of the Atlantic for most months since the beginning of 2019. With the exception of summer 2020, industry growth in the US has outpaced industry growth in the UK.
When we last looked at the Wholesale Club sector, the leading players were all showing strength ahead of the wider retail reopening. Yet, the strength in grocery alongside rising visits in restaurants created the potential for the sector’s top chains to see lower peaks in the summer. We dove into the data to see how the summer treated these brands. Earlier in the year, we noted that Costco visit data was indicating that while the brand was seeing lower overall visits, the actual number of unique visitors was rising.
Global airline capacity continues to be stuck just below the 80 million weekly seat mark, with a modest increase in capacity taking us back to 79 million, thanks largely to capacity increases in North East Asia. It is now very unlikely that we will trend back above the 80 million mark this year, as airlines adjust schedules further and store whatever cash they have generated for the winter season. Total capacity to the year's end is currently standing at 3.7 billion seats compared to the 3.2 billion scheduled in 2020, a 15% increase in what was supposed to be the bounce-back year.
Something odd is happening in homes across the country — Infectious illness is spreading unusually fast for this time of year. Household Secondary Attack Rate, or SAR, measures how transmissible an infectious disease is within a household. In other words, it’s a measure of how likely someone _else_ in the home is to get sick when one family member becomes ill. Kinsa data shows that right now, SAR is as high as during the peak of flu season, despite there being very little flu. Two main factors likely drive this abnormal peak in SAR:
ATTOM’s newly released Q3 2021 Vacant Property and Zombie Foreclosure Report found that 1.3 million residential properties in the U.S. sit vacant, representing 1.4 percent, or one in 74 homes, across the nation. According to ATTOM’s latest vacant properties analysis, while the number of properties in the process of foreclosure in Q3 2021, is down 3.7 percent from Q2 2021 and down 0.2 percent from Q3 2020, among those pre-foreclosure properties, the number of those sitting vacant in Q3 2021 is down quarterly by 6.7 percent and annually by 5.3 percent.
There was a location data report published last month called ‘Malls Rise Once Again’ that caught people’s attention. It claimed that malls have made a ‘full COVID recovery’ and have as many visitors as in 2019. We at Advan live and breathe location data, so our intuitive response was ‘no way, how have we missed this… ’. The reality is, while mall traffic has certainly been improving, it is still down 22% versus 2019. If the visitation estimates for such big, and therefore easier to measure, properties are so off from reality
