JERSEY CITY, N.J. — Commerce Signals, a Verisk Financial company and leading source of U.S. retail payment insights, has announced the availability of the Covid-19 Consumer Spending Impact Tracker, enabling companies to quickly and easily gain valuable insights into U.S. consumer spending behavior across key retail and direct-to-consumer business categories. The solution provides a granular view into spending patterns over time, including regional differences that can be expected to arise as various geographic areas begin to ease restrictions on businesses and consumers.

The tracker allows users to access accurate weekly views of purchases and returns by category, including online vs. in-store, with geographic views down to the county level—all from an easy-to-use and intuitive online dashboard. A datacube is also available for custom analysis

“Retailers and e-commerce companies are hungry for accurate and granular spending data delivered in a timely fashion to help with their strategic, financial, business and marketing planning, especially during these uncertain times,” said Lisa Bonalle-Hannan, president of Verisk Financial.  “The Commerce Signals spend tracker provides the insights companies need to find opportunities, cut waste and create a competitive advantage by understanding how customers are behaving and spending outside of their own businesses.”

“As states and regions start to ease their stay-at-home restrictions and businesses start to reopen, we’ll be closely following whether l consumer spending will follow suit and how quickly, as well as which categories will see a quick rebound and which might see the impacts linger,” added Bonalle-Hannan. “The spend tracker is unique in that it lets you drill down deeply into spending behavior on a weekly basis and look at differences by specific geographies, between online and instore, and across other critical factors.”

Consumer spending patterns are changing dramatically on a weekly basis. For example, nationwide, home stores and wholesale retail store purchases were down by 16.4 percent and 6.5 percent, respectively, from a year earlier (for the week ending March 28). However, during the week ending May 16th, they were up 27.3 percent and 18.1 percent from the same time a year earlier. Online sales that week for home stores and wholesale retailers were up significantly at 97 percent and 60.5 percent, respectively, while in-store sales were up 14.4 percent and down 5.8 percent compared to a year earlier. Sales performance also varies significantly by geography.

The new solution is powered by Commerce Signals’ comprehensive and anonymized consumer credit and debit card spending dataset, which includes transactions from more than 40 million U.S. households. The data is balanced for the total U.S. population by geography and other proprietary metrics.