Ebay artisanal face masks sales skyrocketed during pandemic

Some data about the sales of personal protective equipment during the covid-19 pandemic (on Ebay).

According to a CNN news dated March 19, 2020, Amazon has delivered more than 100 million pieces of protective gear to front line workers and governments during the coronavirus pandemic. But what about non-frontline workers?

While the virus was quickly spreading worldwide, people have started looking for ways to buy personal protective equipment (face masks, respirators, n95 masks) and — I believe it happened pretty much everywhere — during the initial stage of the pandemic some had some troubles finding PPEs in the stores. Of course, this led to speculations/accusations of hoarding.

So I thought it could have been interesting to make some research about how people buying/selling PPEs on Ebay reacted to the alleged shortage of products, namely face masks, n95 masks and respirators.

Specifically, I was interested into monitoring the trend of total listings published on Ebay since January 1st, 2020, as well as the average price until July 31st and the top Ebay sellers and locations from where stuff was being shipped.

Fortunately, a lot of data is available through the Ebay API. However, it is not possible to return more than 10k listings per day for a specific item; so there is some intrinsic inaccuracy. Nontheless, I believe the trends I’ll show hereby can still be significant.

This chart shows the trend for “face mask” listings in the first 7 months of the year:

Until April 2020, daily Ebay listings for “face mask” where actually low, close to zero, but increased as lockdowns started hitting. But what happened on May 11 and 19, when listings peaked to 101k and 60k respectively?

On those days, some vendors published thousands of listings. With the current limitations of the Ebay API, it is not possible to retrieve all the listings to see the most “active” seller, but within the first 10k I could source (for both dates), that an Ebay shop named “myspeedypros” was the winner, with circa 14k listings published. The shop belongs to Speedy Pros Inc, a Florida company.

I was interested into finding out if prices increased or decreased during the pandemic. I was surprised they did not increase at all:

The graph shows the average price per listing from January 1st, 2020, to July 31. Those extremely high values (hundreds of dollars) are not related to covid face masks but to other marine equipment being sold and containing the terms “face” and “mask”. As you can see, when the market “settled” in April and covid-related face masks started being sold at scale, the average price per listing remained around 12/15 dollars. No evidence of speculation here.

But where were the sellers mostly located?

United States and China being the top players, Belarus won the bronze medal with cumulative listings being > 1.5 millions during the first 7 months of 2020.

Within the United States, it can be interesting to see from which locations PPEs are being shipped most:

We can do the same with states:

But we can achieve a better overview with a map where darker states are the ones selling more face masks:

And I think this is an interesting one since there seems to be a clear correlation with the most-pandemic-hit states, according to data by the US Gov:

The list of top-sellers shows that most active shops (such as previously mentioned myspeedypros, which is not shown in this image), have published more than 10k listings:

For instance, the first one, effiascom, refers to the website effias.com, a US based apparel company which recently specialized in face-masks, with production located both in Usa and Vietnam.

Something worth noticing is that many sellers of face masks, such as effias.com, do not sell FDA-approved masks, so check the feature of each item if you want to buy something that is certified and compliant.

Listing stats for “N95" masks and “respirators” are far lower than “face mask”. This is probably due to the fact that these items have been often “seized” by governments, with offer/prices regulated and are technologically superior items, thus not suitable for “artisanal” manufacturing which, on the contary, is compatible with the production of artisanal-fabric face masks.