Quandl Releases New E-Commerce Dataset Ahead of Holidays

Quandl, the alternative data provider owned by Nasdaq, has released a timely, new alternative dataset just ahead of Black Friday and Cyber Monday, two days of major store sales in the US, which leads to the mania that is holiday shopping. Dubbed E-Commerce Intelligence (ECI), the dataset tracks all the transactions of 500 companies and 800 brands over more than 350 online retailers across North America and EMEA.

Quandl sources the data daily via a direct feed from the websites and investors will have access to it on a seven-day lag, cutting down on traditionally longer times associated with other transactional datasets, such as credit and debit card data, which can lag up to 30 days.

“The more you can tell professional investors who are watching these companies about the success—or lack of success—about a product or a campaign they’ve been running, the sooner they can position themselves in front of the quarter,” Tammer Kamel, Quandl’s CEO, tells WatersTechnology. “When we spotted this opportunity, which was quite raw when we found it, we thought if we do enough processing on this data, we can turn it into something that offers near real-time measurements on product sales.”

In theory, Kamel believes they could beat the seven-day time delay, but he isn’t sure whether updating the data by the minute would be truly telling of a product’s reception, and by extension, a company’s overall position. The company doesn’t see any personally identifiable information (PII), but what they do track is every sale made by specific e-retailers in a day, which items were purchased, and the price of an overall order. Then Quandl aggregates the data from each retailer to present a picture of how certain products performed overall in the market that day.

The company conducted three case studies on luggage company Samsonite, cosmetics company Estee Lauder and its subsidiary Clinique, and electronics company Nintendo—all of which revealed some interesting results, Kamel says. While ECI may offer investors an information edge for trading and risk management, and help analysts with their projections and trend insights, Quandl also identified a new use case outside of their usual realm of financial data.

The studies suggested that Quandl, through ECI and perhaps future releases, may find themselves spilling over into the business intelligence space. The companies Quandl is monitoring can also use the dataset as a sort of KPI. Though they likely have internal metrics of their own, they can view the performance of their products and campaigns relative to competitors who run similar campaigns or launch similar products near the same time. Another interesting takeaway was that though data was collected only for online purchases, there was a strong correlation between cyber sales and total sales quarter after quarter.

In 2018, foot traffic at US stores and malls on Black Friday was down, but the holiday garnered a record $6.22 billion in e-commerce sales, reported CNBC last year. Cyber Monday 2018 pulled in another record $7.9 billion, a 19% increase from 2017.

“That is the biggest shopping day of the year for so many retailers,” Kamel says. “For all those analysts covering those stores, they would absolutely love to know exactly what happens on Cyber Monday, and ideally, they’d like to know very quickly after Cyber Monday.”