Data Analysis: Luxury Handbag Price Comparison
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Coming from luxury retail background, I'm interested to see how traditional and iconic luxury brand Saks Fifth Avenue is competing against other emerging ecommerce sites whose inventory is also luxury products. So I picked Farfetch, a UK-based online luxury fashion retail platform and compared their handbag category. I scraped their data using both scrapy and selenium, which includes product price, color, brand titles/description, material, discount. My goal is to find out which retail brand carries more luxury handbag, their price variance and what their common brands are. 
From both retail brands' stock performance, we can see that Saks Fifth Avenue has been in a less competitive position on the market and this can be partially explained by the fierce competition between brick-and-mortar and ecommerce over the past years.
Above charts illustrate the average price range for luxury handbag across Saks and Farfetch. A clear trend shows that Farfetch (second chart) carries much more luxury items and the quantity also triumphs Saks. One thing in common is that handbag with lower than $1,000 still has the highest density across both retail brands (see below charts).
Interestingly, even though Farfetch carries 400 brands and Saks carries 139 brands, there are only 71 common brands among the two, which is only 15% overlapping. Some top common brands ranked by price are Judith Leiber, Oscar De La Renta, Brunello Cucinelli, Bottega Veneta, Loewe, The Row, etcs.
Among these common brands, it looks like Saks tends to offer cheaper handbag across top affordable brands. Luxury handbag price across the top expensive brands seems to vary across both retailers.
Overall, based on the analysis from the data collected/scraped, I've summarize some key conclusions and takeaways:
- Farfetch carries much more handbag products with wider price range.
- Saks fifth avenue is relatively competitive compared to farfetch from the price perspective. However, it should look into designer brands that are exclusive to farfetch in order to generate more traffic.
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