Great British Bake Off spurs online shopping activity

Tuesday, October 13, 2015 - 09:13 by Simon Crisp

Each year the Great British Bake Off keeps millions of Brits glued to their TV screens week after week, as a group of hopeful amateur bakers are whittled down and one conclusive winner is chosen. And it seems that the inspiration provided by the show is impacting what people buy online.

This is according to the latest data from eBay, which revealed that modern consumer habits mean that people were keen to carry out e-commerce searches whilst in the middle of watching last week’s final episode of the latest Bake Off series.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, there was a 680 per cent rise in the number of people searching for ‘baking’ while the show was being aired last Wednesday. And eBay was even able to discover that the final of the Bake Off was more widely influential on shopping habits than the semi-final of the week before.

A 112 per cent increase in searches for the generic term ‘food mixer’ occurred during the event. And this increase is not compared with a normal day, but with the searches seen during the semi-final, which makes it all the more impressive.

Meanwhile, the presence of Kenwood mixers in the tent, along with the trio of hopefuls, helped to earn this specific brand a 240 per cent boost to its e-commerce search activity.

Another brand which benefitted from its exposure on the show was KitchenAid, which underwent a 230 per cent growth in searches via safe shopping online. However, this does not indicate just how many sales were made, nor the extent to which people who buy baking products on an impulse will actually use them in the long run.

Baking searches may remain high in the aftermath of the final, but it will be almost a year before this product category gets a boost when the next Bake Off series arrives.