EDA PROJECT — Which category should I sell products online during the pandemic period?

Abdullah Doğan
3 min readJun 16, 2021

This is my first project at Istanbul Data Science Academy about Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA). We completed this project after 2-week training.

I wonder which product can I sell online under conditions pandemic that’s why I started this project. First of all, I searched data about e-commerce and then I found an e-commerce dataset on the United States Census site.

Here is link of dataset:

https://www.census.gov/retail/index.html#ecommerce

This data gave me everything I need. I used two different tables on this site, firstly the change in e-commerce by years, and secondly, the changes based on categories according to the quarters of the last 3 years.

Variables

- Motor vehicle and parts

- Furniture and home furnishings

- Building materials, garden equipment, and supplies

- Clothing and clothing accessories

- Food and beverage

- Health and personal care

- Sporting goods, hobby musical instrument, and books

First of all, I edited the data and used Pandas and NumPy to edit the data. I used the data I needed, changed the data types. Secondly, I started visualization using ‘matplotlib and seaborn’.

We can see that e-commerce has increased sharply in the last 20 years. It is about %2700.

Then I used the 3-years quarter chart to see the changes by category.

By looking at this chart, we can easily see the changes quarterly. If we take the beginning of the pandemic as the first quarter of 2020, we can look at the rising graphics after the first quarter of 2020. Almost all of the lines risen considerably but some of them reached the highest level. For example, the food and beverage line suddenly increased after the first quarter of 2020 and its rise continues. We can see similarly rising on the motor vehicle and parts. Meanwhile, we do not see a steady rise in clothing and clothing accessories.

I wanted to examine in more detail the category of food, beverage and motor vehicle, motor vehicle parts, that’s why I used a boxplot graph.

First of all, we can easily see that the food and beverage category almost doubled after the first quarter of 2020 and remained at similar levels in the 3rd and 4th quarters of 2020. What about the category of motor and motor parts. Let’s see.

It is seen that there is an increase in the motor and motor parts category after the first quarter of 2020, but not as much as food and beverage. The category of motor and motor parts risen approximately 40%.

At the end of the project, I can say that if you want to sell something online, you should look into food, beverage and motor vehicle, motor vehicle parts.

Future plan: I will examine which product can be sold online and which product is more profitable than others.

Githup:https://github.com/doganapo/e-commerce-report-EDA

--

--