A Data Analytics Look at Home Depot’s Two Best-Selling Chainsaws
On Home Depot’s website, a wide variety of chainsaws are available from a number of dealers, each making their own claim for your attention. But two stand out — one, for its price, and the other, for its number of reviews. It also so happens that both these two chainsaws are positioned first and second on the front page of the “chainsaws” section of the site, making them hard to ignore. If you are the Buyer at Home Depot, or a Product Manager at the companies, it would be very helpful to understand what customers are saying about these products.
The Homelite 14 in. 9 Amp Electric (pictured left) is notable because of its ridiculously inexpensive price — a cool $49.99 when almost every other chainsaw on the site goes for at least $120. On the other hand, the Echo 18 in. 40.2cc Gas costs $299 — but has the most reviews on the front page (583, compared to 424 for Homelite) and is rated roughly half a star higher than the Homelite (4.7 versus 4.2). The star rating is helpful, but doesn’t shed enough insights on why consumers feel the way they do. (See related blog post: John Deere or Cub Cadet.)
Would you trade a roughly $150 price difference for a larger diameter, a different powering system, marginally greater popularity, and half a star worth of ratings? We need to conduct an in-depth investigation into the customer reviews so we can make a conclusion. Let’s use the SignalsTM data analytics platform to dive into the data.
Is the Echo Chainsaw really a Cut Above?
For one to really pick up a $300 chainsaw over a $50 one, it would have to be a significantly better product on multiple fronts than the cheaper one. So does the Echo Chainsaw live up to the task?
In SignalsTM, we have the ability to put two different jobs on the same dashboard and compare them to each other. We dragged and dropped the Category Overview widgets from both the Homelite and the Echo jobs to see them side by side. The Category Overview feature organizes reviews with similar keywords into several different categories, so the words popping out from each category pictured above shows the most frequently used terms in each category.
A full third of the top keywords (boxed in red) are either exactly the same in both charts or contain the same themes — Hot Knife (signaling the smoothness of the device), Light Weight, and Highly Recommend. Smoothness and weight are both core characteristics of chainsaws, and anyone looking to buy one for these characteristics need look no further than the cheapest one on the market, the Homelite Electric.
The places where the two Category Overviews differ, however, are not insignificant. In the Homelite Electric, there seems to be a fixation on diameter (“Inch Diameter”) and its electric-powered nature (“Extension Cord”), whereas in the Echo Gas, people seem to want to talk about its power (“Plenty Power”) and gas-powered nature (“Spark Plug”, “Fill Gas”). Now the question remains: do these differences matter?
Buy a Long Extension Cord
On the Homelite Electric job, the biggest comment about the chainsaw’s electric nature is about its extension cord, so we sifted through the individual feedback that contained the phrase “extension cord” in the Homelite reviews.
The reviews are clear: if you’re going to buy the Homelite, make sure to buy a good extension cord to go with it. At least a “10 gauge” with 50 feet to “get most tasks done”, say these customers. With that being said, if you have a good extension cord, customers are very happy with the electric model, calling it even better than “the hassles of a gas model”. One customer said he “will never buy another gas chainsaw”. With a good enough extension cord, the Homelite has just as much capability and power as a gas-based alternative, the reviews say. Several reviews have even called the Homelite “the little chainsaw that could” for its power capabilities relative to its 14-inch size.
Utilizing the power of Signals 2.0, we found that the Echo chainsaw’s advantages over the Homelite lay primarily in four inches worth of diameter. Its gas-based nature shows no real advantages over the electric chainsaw (with a proper extension cord), and many of its qualities — its smoothness and light weight in particular — are found in its much cheaper counterpart. Unless those four inches are really all that necessary to the customer, data shows there’s not a very compelling case for shelling out 150 more dollars for the Echo. With the benefit of data-driven analysis, we went deeper than the star ratings in order to improve our decision-making as a customer. Imagine what Signals can do when paired with your business.
Are you interested in trying out the SignalsTM data analytics platform for yourself? Contact us on clientsupport@stratifyd.com and we will be happy to help in your data analytics project.
