States Don’t Spend the Same: How States Compare When it Comes to Online Shopping

These last few months have shifted shopping behaviors that have been forced online by national lockdowns and quarantine measures. And as we’ve been staying at home due to the pandemic, we have been confined to a more digital landscape.

We know that from a high vantage point this boosted ecommerce revenue in Q1 (which we covered here) but how are shopping habits playing out at the state level? Salesforce has carried out an analysis of regional online shopping behavior across the country for March, and reveals some interesting insights. Let’s take a look.

East Coast vs West Coast

The highest spenders when it comes to online shopping were located on the East Coast and Midwest. New York, Boston, and Chicago came out on top. Home to some of the most densely populated areas in the country, these places have also seen some of the stricter lockdown measures, creating a huge group of people that are mandated to stay home. This is particularly acute in New York, the epicenter of the pandemic in the United States.

Other key findings include: shoppers on the East Coast outspent their West Coast neighbors on digital purchases by 200%; when it came to purchasing essential goods, shoppers who spent the most were in Colorado, which made up almost one-fourth of all digital spending in March in the state; while the state least likely to make online purchases of essentials was Oregon, where only 6% of online sales were essential goods. The two states may share a rugged and rocky landscape but they were miles apart in their need for canned food and toilet paper.

In general, there was correlation between states that implemented tight quarantine orders in March and spikes in digital revenue. Among these states, 49% of online shopping in New York happened after stay-at-home orders were implemented on the 19th March, the highest in the country. This was followed by neighbors across the Hudson River in New Jersey (43%) whose measures came into effect on the 21st March, as well as Illinois (43%) whose measures came into effect on the same day as New Jersey.

The mobile highway

With March being a month of lockdown, we took to our phones more than ever before, swapping road traffic for online traffic. The states that swamped Online Main Street the most were Michigan and Mississippi, who witnessed the highest rate of mobile traffic at 77%, whereas the state with the lowest rate of mobile traffic, with 39%, was the wild state of Wyoming.

Some states were more proactive in their purchases than others, and in particular, Missouri, who recorded the highest rate of mobile orders in the country in March, with 62% of mobile order share. Those with the lowest rates occurred in Vermont, with 39% mobile order share.

With ecommerce taking different twists and turns depending on the state, Demandware (now SFCC) is a powerful ecommerce platform that enables smarter segmentation strategies engineered and driven by Einstein AI.

PS: UV is one of the world’s leading Salesforce B2C Commerce Cloud (Demandware) development & strategy teams. Contact us to see how we can work together.