Retailers in COVID Link

Team members: Xinbo Wang, Farhad Mughal, Mark Chen, Weizhong Yao

Overview

Retailers in COVID is a course project in my first semester of the MSBA program at UMN. Since COVID-19 brought so much uncertainty in retail traffic, the retailers need to allocate their resources more wisely. To help visualize the impact of COVID-19 on the retail industry, my team built this R-Shiny dashboard utilizing the data from Google Mobility.

Content

The repository contains three core files.

mobility_data_fetching_preparing.R

This is the R script that fetches the data from the Google platform and makes transformations to output the data for our dashboard.

data_for_dashboard.csv

This is the data output by the script and to be visualized in the R Markdown file.

Retailers-in-COVID.Rmd

This is the R Markdown file that can be knitted to form the R-Shiny dashboard shown in the link R-Shiny dashboard

How to Use the Dashboard

The green spots on the maps represent the counties that have increased traffic in retailer stores and red spots are ones with decreased traffic, compared to pre-COVID. The size of the spots represents a change in percentage (larger spots = larger change). As you can see, the map is crowded by spots (counties). To make it easier to read, we built several widgets that can filter data.

Filter by State

Filter by Population Density

Zoom In

Conclusion

Using our dashboard, retailers can allocate resources smartly according to retail traffic, especially in a time like COVID.