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The internet has long been a reliable place to get low prices on nearly everything. In fact, relentlessly cutting prices has been a hallmark of Big Tech. “The consumer has gotten used to expecting about a 4 percent decrease in online prices each year since as long as we've been tracking, which is as far back as 2014,” says Vivek Pandya, senior digital insights manager at Adobe.
No longer. Thanks to the pandemic, supply-chain problems and worker shortages, those days have ended, at least temporarily. Internet prices have risen 2.3 percent over the 12 months that ended in June, Adobe says, and 0.6 percent in June alone.
Surging demand has been behind these rising prices as well. Internet sales grew 77 percent in the 12 months that ended in June, mainly because people were spending more time at home and less time in brick-and-mortar stores. “That's pretty sizable growth in the online ecosystem, and it sort of ripples into price inflation,” Pandya says.
It's a big world, and not everything has risen in price over the past 12 months. The cost of electronics, for example, has fallen 2.5 percent — but that's compared to a 9.1 percent average decrease from 2015 to 2019. Here are some of the biggest online price increases over the past 12 months.
1. Apparel (+16.2 percent)
This reliably cheap category saw an average price drop of 1.1 percent a year from 2015 to 2019. Why the price spike? For one thing, demand for new clothes swooned in June 2020. You probably didn't buy a lot of suits, ties or other office apparel then: The nation was deep in lockdown, and you can only have so many pairs of sweatpants. A year later, however, companies were making plans for employees to rejoin the workforce, and demand surged. At the same time, manufacturing and shipping costs rose, too.
