As we detailed in our previous post, transaction volume at fuel stations across the country has dropped significantly. In many areas, ~50% of pre-COVID volume appears to be the “new normal” while stay-at-home orders remain in effect and the market remains uncertain.
What is the source of the remaining volume that we continue to see? Transactions that are still occurring are largely related to essential travel - whether essential workers traveling to and from their jobs, or consumers making essential trips to pick up essentials (such as groceries). In an environment such as this, where transactions are sharply down and travel is likely to remain limited for at least the near-term, it is critically important for stations to capture as much as possible of the remaining, essential travel-related volume in their area.
This is where GetUpside can serve as a crucial tool to help our merchants stay ahead of the competition; we are actively working to consolidate the remaining market demand to our merchants’ fuel stations by launching a ~$6M stimulus to subsidize all user offers. By giving higher offers to our consumers (at no additional cost to our merchants), we are putting more money in the pockets of consumers when they need it most, and driving more volume to our merchants’ sites.
In order to understand the impact that GetUpside is having on our merchants’ transaction volume during this challenging time, we took a look at the share of transactions at participating sites that are conducted using GetUpside. We compared GetUpside’s share of transactions across all participating sites nationwide for March 16-29 (the first two weeks since states & municipalities began instituting measures to combat the spread of COVID-19) versus the preceding weeks.
In the above chart, the blue line represents the percent of transactions that take place using GetUpside across all sites that are on the GetUpside platform, nationwide; the dotted orange line is a “best fit” line, which smooths out the week-on-week fluctuations to show the aggregate trend across the seven weeks of data presented here.
From this data, it is clear that an increasing share of site transactions nationwide are taking place using GetUpside. In fact, if we compare the weeks of March 16-29 (the first two full weeks following the institution of COVID-related policy measures) to the period of February 17-March 8, we see that GetUpside’s share of transactions has increased by 21%, going from an average of 2.2% of volume to 2.7% of volume across all participating sites.
If we review the data at a market level, this trend continues to hold true. In fact, as the chart below illustrates, GetUpside represents a higher share of transactions today in key markets across the country; in the most significant examples (such as Ft. Myers, Detroit, and Minneapolis), GetUpside’s average share of transactions has increased by roughly a third from pre-COVID levels.
What does this all mean? It means that GetUpside is one of the smartest decisions you can make for your business right now. While volume is significantly down, GetUpside is successfully driving a disproportionate share of the remaining demand to our merchants’ sites, and we are continuing to subsidize all user offers to ensure that this trend continues.