From panic buying to bankruptcies, the COVID-19 pandemic has had massive implications for retailers. In this Intelligence report, we analyse the trends affecting the retail industry and highlight pandemic-specific data sources that can help gauge the financial performance of retail stocks.

N.B This piece bypasses the likes of transactional and POS data, and touches on some of the lesser-known sources. For those uninitiated with “essential” retail data, we advise reading our report on bread-and-butter datasets for the consumer staples sector.

GAUGING CONSUMER SENTIMENT

Retail has seen a peculiar eight weeks, with the coronavirus having had rather antithetic effects on essential and non-essential retailers. Globally, consumers have reported that they intend to withhold from spending on most non-essential retail categories, apart from home entertainment, in a report published by