H1 2021 Icecat: 6 billion product data-sheet downloads and 88% increase in Brand Cloud use

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Icecat business continued to grow in the first six months of 2021 (H1). The total number of product data sheet downloads, including LIVE, in H1 2021 compared to H1 2020 increased by 102%. In numbers a staggering 5.8 billion data-sheet downloads in H1 2020. This growth is explained partly by the increase in the number of active Icecat users by 10%.

88% increase in use of Brand Cloud

Icecat Free Brand Cloud is increasingly popular. More and more brand owners are willing to deliver their product data to their online channel partners via Icecat. For this purpose, they use Icecat Brand Cloud to enter their product data in the Icecat system. The total number of registered brand managers in Icecat Brand Cloud increased by 34% in H1 2021, year-on-year. Further, we see even higher growth in the number of new registrations in the Icecat Brand Cloud by 67%. Most importantly, the number of active users of the Icecat Brand Cloud has increased even by 88%.

The number of product data sheets modified by brand owners in the Icecat system increased by 180%. But, at the same time, the number of newly described products by brand owners dropped by 48%. This means that brand owners increasingly rely on the initial production by Icecat, and shift their focus to improving product data sheets by adding localized content or making corrections.

Production increased by 43% to 1.1 million data sheets

To catch up with the increased demand for datasheets from the e-commerce channel, Icecat is investing in productivity tools for editors to increase editorial efficiency. These tools helped to drive the average cost per data-sheet (CPD) down by 34%. And, also resulted in an increase of 43% in the overall production in H1 2021 of 1.1 million Icecat quality data sheets. In effect, it pushed the total number of Icecat quality data sheets beyond the 10 million mark.

The in-house developed web-based Data Acquisition Tool is one such productivity tool. This tool helps to almost double the number of connected brand sources from 34 to 58, resulting in 90K additional product data sheets. Although less than 10% of the overall production still, it’s a meaningful contribution.

Popularity Icecat portals grows by 174%

According to Alexa, the ranking of icecat.biz has improved by 40% and according to Similarweb by 64%, which was caused by a 174% year-on-year increase in the number of product visits to 3.0 billion in H1 2021. The average number of logged-in monthly portal users increased by 16% to 1,389.

At the same time, also our manual and news portal, Iceclog, shows an improvement of 64% in the Alexa ranking, caused by an increase of 96% in visits.