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The electronic card transactions (ECT) series cover debit, credit, and charge card transactions with New Zealand-based merchants. The series can be used to indicate changes in consumer spending and economic activity.

Key facts

All figures are seasonally adjusted unless otherwise specified.

Values are at the national level and are not adjusted for price changes.

April 2024 month

Changes in the value of electronic card transactions for the April 2024 month (compared with March 2024) were:

• spending in the retail industries decreased 0.4 percent ($25 million)
• spending in the core retail industries decreased 0.7 percent ($40 million).

By retail spending category, movements were:

• motor vehicles (excluding fuel), down $1.0 million (0.5 percent)
• apparel, down $5.7 million (1.7 percent)
• hospitality, down $5.6 million (0.4 percent)
• fuel, down $6.1 million (1.1 percent)
• consumables, down $9.0 million (0.3 percent)
• durables, down $11 million (0.7 percent).

Note, the seasonally adjusted series are adjusted independently of each other, therefore, the sum of the component categories may differ from the total.

The non-retail (excluding services) category increased by $47 million (2.2 percent) from March 2024. This category includes medical and other health care, postal and courier delivery, travel and tour arrangement, and other non-retail industries.

The services category was up $24 million (6.8 percent). This category includes repair and maintenance, and personal care, funeral, and other personal services.

The total value of electronic card spending, including the two non-retail categories (services and other non-retail), increased from March 2024, up $85 million (0.9 percent).

In actual terms, cardholders made 160 million transactions across all industries in April 2024, with an average value of $55 per transaction. The total amount spent using electronic cards was $8.8 billion.

Enhancements to seasonal adjustment methodology

We have implemented enhancements to the seasonal adjustment methodology for electronic card transactions (ECT) series with the April 2024 release.

The main change is to adopt the new Stats NZ standards for extreme additive outliers in seasonal adjustment.

We have made other changes for ECT series to:

• resume publishing trend series, which were suppressed during the period significantly affected by COVID-19
• resume publishing seasonally adjusted series for the hospitality industry, which was also suppressed during the period significantly affected by COVID-19
• remove trading day factors for quarterly ECT series to align with international best practice
• resolve an issue in composite quarterly series (core retail, total retail, total ECT) calculations
• restrict updates to seasonally adjusted and trend series from 2017 onwards. ECT data between October 2002 and December 2016 will not be updated anymore.

The methodology changes only impact the seasonally adjusted and trend data. There is no impact on the actual data series.

Additive outliers for seasonal adjustment and trend

describes how we previously managed extreme outliers using additive outliers at Stats NZ and the methodology changes we are now implementing for ECT.

Other Stats NZ collections have also changed to the new methodology. For example, seasonal adjustment enhancements to the Retail Trade Survey were implemented with the release of December 2023 quarter results on 23 February 2024. provides more information.

We reviewed the impact of the new methodology on seasonally adjusted ECT series and determined no complex treatments, such as level shifts or temporary changes to any ECT series, were required. Automatic outlier detection according to the new method has been applied from the March 2020 month and quarter onwards.

Impact of enhancements on the data

The combined impact of the enhancements to ECT series causes updates to the seasonally adjusted and trend series. The largest data updates in monthly and quarterly movements generally occur in COVID-19 affected periods and in more recent periods. Changes are less than plus or minus 1 percent of the level of monthly seasonally adjusted total retail trade.

Data updates

We have updated the fuel category results for February and March 2024 months, for the March 2024 quarter and for year ended March 2024, after receiving updated data.

Updates to the fuel category affect total retail, total electronic card transactions, and some other series, for both actual and seasonally adjusted values.

The following tables show the updates to the actual values for the monthly and quarterly fuel series.

Updates to fuel category (actual values) published in March 2024

Month	Fuel (series ref: ECTM S1GA7)
	$ (million)
	Published 12 April 2024	Updated 14 May 2024	Difference
Feb 2024	526	570	45
Mar 2024	544	591	47

Quarter	Fuel (series ref: ECTQ S1GA7)
	$(million)
	Published 12 April 2024	Updated 14 May 2024	Difference
Mar 2024	1,640	1,731	91

We have revised the data in the published series, and these are listed with a revision flag on the affected series in the published tables, CSV files, and relevant Infoshare series.

More data

Use to access the electronic card transactions time series:

Subject category: Economic indicators
Group: Electronic card transactions (ANZSIC06) – ECT

Definitions and metadata

gives general methodology used to produce electronic card transaction statistics.

gives definitions of terms used in this release.

Technical enquiries

Valentine Modera

ISSN 1178-0258

Next release

Electronic card transactions: May 2024 will be released on 13 June 2024.