MANY BUSINESSES have gone online due to the pandemic because of the closures of physical stores, limitations on movement, and general fear of being sick. E-commerce platforms like Lazada and Shopee have introduced more and more sellers on their sites, and online second-hand marketplace Carousell is no different. What is different is a new category becoming popular in the quarantine: food.

“During the quarantine period alone, chats for items in the F&B (food and beverage) segment alone increased by 188%. Filipinos were both selling their homemade goods on Carousell and using it to source for their cooking and baking needs too, right down to the nitty gritty of equipment such as whisks, which more than doubled in demand,” a company release said.

This new category, introduced in April and a “joint initiative with Unilever Food Solutions,” currently has “over 13,000 [F&B merchants]” on the platform, according to a separate e-mail to BusinessWorld on July 24.

Some of the F&B merchants on Carousell sell cakes, pastries, and other baked goods, fresh produce, frozen goods, and ready-to-cook products, seafood platters, etc.

This trend, Carousell said, is not something that will go away even if the pandemic ends as “the post-pandemic world is already molding itself to be digitally driven.”

YOGA MATS AND DUMBBELLS AS QUARANTINE ESSENTIALS
Before the pandemic, Carousell’s most popular categories were fashion and electronics, but habits changed while in quarantine and people gravitated towards healthcare essentials (sanitizers and masks). As the months passed, even that changed with the company saying that in recent months, the biggest jumps in searches and transactions happened in the fitness category: yoga mats, dumbbells, and workout clothes.

Workout equipment in particular, saw 55,000 searches from February to June of this year compared to 6,000 searches from September 2019 to January 2020. There were also 122,000 searches made for swimming pools.

What’s notable about these numbers is that these are the same categories that Lazada reported to have been popular during quarantine. In June, Lazada reported that it sold 65,000 yoga mats, and 140,000 inflatable pools during the lockdown. (Read more: https://www.bworldonline.com/milk-tea-pearls-and-yoga-mats-fruits-and-meat-what-people-ordered-from-lazada-during-the-lockdown/)

Carousell reported that it saw a total 450,000 transactions from February to June. — Zsarlene B. Chua

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