During these trying times, along with dedicating our efforts to our customers and our community, we have also been coming to the aid of many e-commerce retailers with our plugins. They have been especially useful for online stores that are facing an onslaught of traffic prompted by the current scenario, wherein many consumers are stocking up on essential goods.
How our products are faring
Our sales for our plugin Order Delivery Date have gone up by 40% from last year’s trend. We speculate that the reason behind this is that given the current scenario, the primary customers buying our plugin are online stores that sell physical goods. They have been overwhelmed by more traffic on their online stores and are unable to keep up with making deliveries in a timely fashion, and are thus, purchasing our plugin to provide timely delivery and manage stock and inventory on their online store.
To further elucidate on this, let’s take an example. If a store has 300 units of cereal, Cerelac powder or some other such product and the store owner is unable to deliver it in two days, by installing our plugin, they can choose to block the delivery date option in settings after for instance, 20 deliveries per day and manage to serve a large number of customers while ensuring that people do not hoard goods. They can also select the location so they can deliver in a timely fashion.
These essential features of our plugin provide our customers with an added advantage in these tumultuous times.
Industries using our plugin
Our plugin order delivery date plugin is generally used by online retailers, but many of our customers are online store owners who are in the food industry including, sellers of perishable goods. The sale of our plugins have skyrocketed starting from the month of March. There has been a 200% increase in sales as compared to the months of January and February 2020. There has also been a 200% growth in plugin revenues in the month of February 2020 and 160% in comparison to January 2020.
Based on our analysis of our customer base for the period of March 10th to April 21st, we have found that most of them fall in the food and beverages category, including not only restaurants and bakeries but also sellers of fresh fruits and vegetables, meat and poultry as well as other perishable goods.
As of April (upto 21st of April), the growth in plugin sales is 480% more compared to Feb 2020 & Jan 2020.
And the growth in plugin revenues is 310% more in comparison to Feb 2020 and 260% more when compared to Jan 2020. We had 1398 Order Delivery Date plugin’s licenses active until 19th April. Our customer base is global, ranging from European countries like Poland’s Prostozrynku, which provides grocery deliveries, Italy’s Osteria El Cantini,which specialises in delivering authentic Italian cuisine and Ragged Robin Florist in the United Kingdom, which delivers floral arrangements. We also have customers in South-East Asia, including Craft Tea Fox in Singapore, which delivers Matcha Tea Lattes at various locations in the country.
Sustainability of business based on country specific data
Data based on the UK markets
Supermarkets in the United Kingdom saw a 20.6% rise in sales during the month of March, which is a new record for the sector, as most consumers stocked up groceries for their homes and stopped eating out at restaurants. In the four weeks leading to March 31st, the public spent £10.8 billion on groceries – an amount that supersedes what is typically spent during the national holiday season- Christmas.
The week starting from the 16th of March was especially busy for grocery shopping, with as many as 88% of households making an average of five shopping trips to supermarkets between Monday and Thursday. That would total up to approximately 42 million additional supermarket outings in this relatively short span of time. This in turn boosted the local online stores and the traffic on their sites for the delivery of essential commodities.
Kantar’s data revealed that the average household has spent an additional sum of £62 on groceries alone in the past month, and that many are now turning to smaller convenience stores as they heed the government’s advice to stay close to home when venturing outside.
Indeed, brand-owned and independent corner shops both experienced a 30% spike in sales in the past four weeks as compared to the four weeks prior to that, thus enlarging their total share of the grocery market by more than 13%.
Data based on the US markets
Adobe’s 2020 Digital Economy Index analyses trillions of online transactions across 100 million products in 18 categories in the United States of America. Some of the top insights that Adobe has uncovered are: The digital purchasing power of the average American consumer has increased by 20%. So computers and monitors have seen a 40% increase in average daily sales when comparing between March 1st to 10th and March 11th to 25th .
Fitness equipment has seen a 55% increase in sale when comparing the same time periods. From January 1st to March 11th , the sale of non-perishables has increased by 87%. During that same time period, the sale of safety and hygiene products like gloves, masks, hand sanitizer, soaps and toilet paper, etc.) has increased by 807% and that of over-the-counter cold/flu medication by 217%.
Some of our other plugins
While our Order Delivery Date plugin is one of our quick selling products at the moment, we also have a number of other plugins, 31 of them to be precise. Some of the popular plugins are Booking and Appointment plugin, Abandoned Cart Pro plugin, Product Delivery Date Pro plugin, Deposits plugin and some others including the Customer Order Status plugin and the Call For Price plugin.
We recommend coupling our Order Delivery Date plugin with the Abandoned Cart plugin for WooCommerce for online stores. The plugin, allows the online retailer to set up automated reminder emails, texts and Facebook messages, to both logged in and visiting customers who abandon their products in the the carts on your website and helps to recover sales that would otherwise be lost.
Lastly, our Order delivery date plugin has contributed to 50% of our total sales during this pandemic and it has also resulted in the rest of our plugins also doing well.
