As you’d expect, October is the leading month for the little orange and yellow Halloween staples. But according to new data from Slice Intelligence, only 40 percent of total online candy corn sales from 2015 and 2016 happened in the months of October.
That’s right: candy corn sells throughout the year. Candy corn buying volume is spread fairly evenly throughout the year, spiking around the Easter season as well as November, as shoppers capitalize on discounts. In 2016, four percent of online candy corn sales occurred in May, and 25 percent in November.
People Buy Candy Corn year-round
But most of the little orange confections are purchased in the fall
Copyright © Rakuten Intelligence 2019. October 1, 2014 - September 30, 2017. n = 1,894
No hocus pocus: Halloween candy sales jump in the lead up to the holiday
For the top 10 candy brands, as measured by Slice Intelligence, the opportunity to sell Halloween candy is broader than one might expect, as the bulk of Halloween candy sales occur during the last two-thirds of October.
"The pleasant surprise in this data is that there is ample opportunity for candy marketers to generate sales early enough in October that they might be able to avoid peak marketing costs up against the holiday,” said Ken Cassar, Slice Intelligence’s principal analyst. “And by generating sales early in the Halloween season they might find that consumers need to re-stock as the trick or treaters in their own home hit the candy early."
Online Halloween candy buying isn’t limited to the last minute
In 2015 and 2016, the last two-thirds of October paced online Halloween candy sales
Copyright © Rakuten Intelligence 2019. October 1 - 31, 2015; October 1 - 31, 2016; October 1 - 13, 2017. n = 32,965
Online candy sales get sweeter every year
As we reported last year, the biggest holiday for online candy sales isn’t Halloween, but Christmas. Nevertheless, last year, 22 percent more people headed online for their Halloween candy buying than they did the previous year. Overall, total candy sales were up 34 percent year over year in 2016, compared to the 18 percent growth Halloween candy showed offline, according to the National Retail Federation.
About this data
With a panel of 5 million online shoppers, Slice Intelligence gives the most detailed, and accurate digital commerce data available, and is reported daily.
Slice Intelligence is the only service to measure digital commerce directly from the consumer, across all retailers, at the item level, and over time. Our retailer-independent methodology precisely measures commerce as it happens. By extracting detailed information from hundreds of millions of aggregated and anonymized e-receipts, Slice can map the entire Purchase Graph, connecting each and every consumer to all their purchases.
Slice gets its data from e-receipts – not a browser, app or software installed by the end-user – so its measurement reflects comprehensive shopping behavior across multiple devices, over time which are key in an increasingly omnichannel retail world. Slice Intelligence is the exclusive e-commerce data provider for the NPD’s Checkout Tracking e-commerce service.
