Shanghai Fashion Week was live streamed to 700 million digital buyers on Alibaba’s Tmall and Taobao platforms in March, and all products shown were available for purchase. Chinese ecommerce giant JD.com partnered with Anheuser-Busch and Rémy Cointreau to live stream DJ sets to promote their beverages. The success of these live streams has prompted JD.com to extend the initiative to at least May.

Retail: Includes mail order/catalog, restaurants/fast food, drug stores, retail stores, cosmetics stores, and merchants of apparel, home furnishings/textiles, toys, pet food/supplies, appliances, jewelry, and general merchandise.

But for most categories, such as general merchandise and apparel, overnight shipping is really the sweet spot where you're going to see retailers move from same-day to overnight. And why does that matter? Because most of us shop at night. We're home from work, the kids are in bed, and same-day is just not plausible when shopping [online] at 8pm.

But with more than half of respondents likely to purchase products like electronics, apparel, and home improvement items online, the likelihood for returns may also be high.

Clothing/shoes/jewelry/accessories were the most popular category, with 38% of online shoppers making at least one purchase monthly. Eighty percent of households with children and an annual family income of more than $80,000 made online purchases.

Items like office supplies, clothing, watches and jewelry posted declines of more than 30% compared with the prior period. The bottom line: For brands garnering substantial online sales, and for retailers able to maintain robust supply chains and efficient delivery schedules, advertising can still result in healthy ROI during the pandemic.

Meanwhile, the “guochao” movement has revived in young consumers an interest in traditional Chinese culture, from its ingredients to apparel, to decorative motifs. Blind boxes are popular, too; customer won’t know what product they have bought until they unwrap it, which adds an element of surprise and even encourages repeat purchases.

The travel, fashion/apparel, automotive and media/entertainment categories were most affected by budget cuts. As a result of dire economic conditions and damaged media buyer sentiment, we have substantially revised our ad spending projections for 2020. Whereas we previously expected total ad spending to grow 5.1% this year, we now project a 7.8% decline.

The sports apparel giant also cited that its ecommerce business in China outperformed its global growth of 55% during the same month. Adults in China are showing an increased appetite to spend, while the desire to save trends slightly lower, according to a March 2020 study from McKinsey & Co.

The categories most likely to be facing cuts in consumer spending at that point were furniture (12.8%), apparel (12.8%) and electronics and appliances (10.7%). March 2020 research from the American Association of Advertising Agencies (4A’s) found food and household supplies at the top of most shopping lists, with personal care and healthcare products rounding out the top four.

It is the embodiment of who the company is, what it stands for, and how it will serve its customers, employees, and (in a more grandiose fashion) its industry, and society. As B2B marketing becomes more targeted and data-driven, one might assume that a strong brand strategy isn’t necessary since performance strategies can drive pipeline and close deals. But that is a fallacy.

While travel and tourism made up the greatest share of B2C ecommerce sales (21.6%), CACE’s figures indicated that food, beverage and cleaning products were the third-fastest-growing product categories online, growing at 111.0%, just behind car and motorcycle accessories, and cosmetics and perfumes, at 111.6% and 118.3%, respectively.

According to data from market research firm The NPD Group cited by Forbes, US retail sales of video game hardware, software, and accessories and game cards reached $1.5 billion in April 2020, up 73% YoY. As for gaming apps, the average number of weekly downloads were up 20% in Q2 2020 compared with the same quarter last year, per data compiled by App Annie.

The number of available lineups varies by market, but there are at least 10 core lineups in the US, including Entertainment & Pop Culture, Music, Sports, Food & Recipes, Beauty, Fashion & Lifestyle, Comedy, Spanish Language, Technology, Gaming, and Science & Education.

In the AR space, several companies talked up interesting accessories and content. These included Tilt Five, whose forthcoming consumer AR system uses a unique reflective method to project a game board on a tabletop; and Nreal, which announced Nebula, a software system that works with the company’s soon-to-ship Nreal Light AR glasses.