Weather Factors Impact on Online Sales

Posted on by wishingwork

The impact of weather factors to brick-and-mortar stores is obvious. Rainy day is inconvenient, hot day is uncomfortable, and snowy day is dangerous, so people rather stay home instead of go out for shopping. If people stay home, does online shopping become more? Does the weather affect online business? This post summarizes the weather impact to e-commerce businesses from some published article, enterprise report and analytic company blogs.

Different weather factors have different impact to e-commerce sales

From Adobe Analytics analysis for 2022 online sales, they found different impacts to online business from different weather factors (Lasiy, C. 2023) :

  • Rain: When rain arrives 1 inch, online sales increase 4%. In the autumn, the rain effect is more obvious: Even in a drizzle day, the rain will increase 5% online sales.
  • Wind: When wind speed is less than 25mph, online sales may increase with the wind. Over 25 mph is dangerous, so online sales drop a lots.
  • Snow: Snow may drop and increase sales depending on different locations.

As we can see the weather impact to people may be different depending on the environment where people get used to be. In other words, weather impact is location dependent. (Meisenzahl, M. 2023, METEONOMIQS. retrieved 2023(1), Qapla’ 2022)

Weather impact is location and timely dependent

Weather effect to online sales varies by different time, location, product, and channels. People under different environment may feel the same weather status differently. Here are the the different categories of dependencies:

  • Temporal dependency: Weather impact more obvious in weekends comparing to weekdays and more in summer comparing to winter days. (Steinker, S. et al. 2017)
  • Location dependency: Snow may drop sales in the south cities (Austin and Charlotte) but increase sales in the north cities (New York City and Seattle). Wind may drop sales in a less common strong wind city (Atlanta), but not affect much in Windy city Chicago (Adobe Analytics 2023, WeatherAds Retrieved 2023).
  • Product dependency: Rain and temperature may impact the medicine products linearly, but too cold or too hot both decrease the snack sales (METEONOMIQS. retrieved 2023(1)).
  • When people get used to the bad weathers, the weather impact is less (Qapla’ 2022, Lasiy, C. 2023)
For rare snow cities, snow is a negative factor to online sales. For normal snow cities, snow is a positive factor for sales. For heavy snow place, it doesn’t matter. (In Adobe Analytics 2023)

Strategies to adapt weather impact

As in the METEONOMIQS post mentioned, we can’t change the weather, but we can change our strategy depending on clients responding to the weather (METEONOMIQS. retrieved 2023(2)). There are something we can do to leverage the change of online sales dependent on weather factors:

  • Production recommendation (product optimization) (Qapla’ 2022, METEONOMIQS. retrieved 2023(2)): Online business can provide suitable product when the weather status changes for increasing sales. The more general strategy is dynamic content which is changing website contents depending on the current weather.
  • Dynamic advertisement (also known search engine advertising (SEA) or weather-optimized ads) (Steinker, S. et al. 2017, METEONOMIQS. retrieved 2023(2)): Under different weather status, people may have different search keywords. For example, hotels might become popular in good weather weekends. Business may adapt their advertising strategy depending on the weather status.
  • Dynamic marketing campaign (also known weather targeting marketing) (Lasiy, C. 2023, METEONOMIQS. retrieved 2023(2)): When we predict that there is a business need for a certain time, for example a dry season coming, business can prepare the beverage campaign to motivate the sales.
  • Dynamic pricing (Steinker, S. et al. 2017): Online business can change price considering not only the demand but also the weather condition. For example, when a good weather coming, the demand can increase for hotels. So business can adapt the good weather to change the price.

There are other applications for online business to adapt the weather condition, such as value chain (including supply chain and logistic) adaption (Steinker, S. et al. 2017) and data analysis customization (ex: Weather tags in Google Analysts) (METEONOMIQS. retrieved 2023(2))

Although we can expect weather may impact online store business since the physical store shopping is affected, the impact to online business is quite depending on the environments. Season, location, and product type etc. all may affect the impact of weather condition to the online business. Furthermore, when people get used to the bad weathers, like heavy snow or strong wind, the weather effect becomes less influenced to their shopping behavior. Due to the weather factors can impact online business, we should develop our own weather-based strategy for our online business to adapt the weather condition changes.

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