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Digital Insights and Trends on How Sri Lankans Search for Essentials Online During Lockdown

Last couple of weeks have shown interesting online shopping behavior & trends in Sri Lanka. So we thought its timely and relevant to analyze the search behavior of Sri Lankans during the lockdown. Online grocery shopping has never been a widespread activity amongst Sri Lankans, yet for the past few weeks we saw the complete opposite trend, where everyone was getting on board with the online shopping bandwagon.

With the current situation rapidly changing, we see that more and more people shifting to online shopping, resulting a countrywide change in shopping behavior. We have put together some e-commerce search trends to help you closely monitor the search behavior, interest & demand. This report is automatically updated on a daily basis to display the latest trends.

With the help of Google Trends, we have identified patterns for variety of search terms that includes; essential items, online shopping related, top Sri Lankan super markets and food related keywords. Additional trends, amendments and information will be continuously added to further improve the data presented.

 

 

Online Shopping

Increasing trend in Online shopping related search terms were recorded and peak was recorded in 26th of March after Curfew announcements by the government.

Top Supermarket brand related keyword searches recorded a sudden increase.

Increasing trend in Online shopping related search terms were recorded and peak was recorded in 26th of March after Curfew announcements by the government. However, Keells Super was clearly the most popular brand search term. People looked for Keells Super using different keywords while the most popular keyword associated with “delivery” shows the need of the hour.

It was interesting to see the search behavior of various search phrases related to food and other essentials. “Grocery” and “Milk” were most popular searches

Although there are health concerns about fast food during this period of time we could see an increase in “Food” related terms. This shows people are looking out for options and there is definitely a huge market for fast food; provided that there is no major warning about consuming fast food.

Interest of people for fast food was clearly visible when looking at the brand related searches belonging to popular food outlets

Search for Dairy products showed an upward trend during the last few weeks. People were primarily searching for Milk and Milk Powder related terms.

Last 7 days search trends were analyzed to see whether there is a change in the trends with the launch of the Milco Website with online ordering system. Milco & Highland brands clearly were ahead in searches and this was improved after the launch of the Milco https://www.milcosrilanka.com website.

We thought of analyzing the searches related to Milco and Highland since we saw a huge popularity with the launch of MilcoSriLanka.com.

Internet and Broadband

In addition to searches on essentials, there was a positive trend for searches related to Internet and broadband.

Online Banking

Another spike during the past few weeks we saw was for search terms related to online banking.

When we analyze the trends further for the past 7 days, we see that people follow a common pattern during the day where searches peak from 8:30Am till about 1:30PM & 2:00PM for online banking

We also further analyzed the search terms related to top banks in Sri Lanka and noticed the same trend across all the banks

Online Medicine

Online medicine related search terms have also shown a spike during the past couple weeks in Sri Lanka

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