Analyzing Mid‑Autumn Festival Mooncake Sales on Taobao with Python

The Mid‑Autumn Festival, a traditional Chinese holiday, features various customs including the consumption of mooncakes; this tutorial analyzes mooncake sales data from Taobao to identify popular flavors and regions.

Data is processed with Python libraries: Pandas for data handling, Pyecharts for visualization, jieba for text segmentation, and collections for statistical aggregation.

1. Import Modules – Load the required libraries.

2. Data Processing with Pandas 2.1 Read the raw CSV data. 2.2 Remove duplicate entries, reducing 4,520 rows to 1,885 unique records. 2.3 Handle missing values, especially empty purchase‑person fields. 2.4 Convert payment‑person figures expressed with the Chinese "万" unit back to numeric values and compute sales volume (price × quantity).

3. Visualization with Pyecharts 3.1 Plot the top‑10 mooncake products by sales. 3.2 Show the top‑10 shops selling mooncakes. 3.3 Map nationwide sales distribution, highlighting concentrations in Beijing, Shandong, Zhejiang, Guangdong and Yunnan. 3.4 Display sales proportion across price intervals, noting that over 50% of sales are for mooncakes under ¥50 and 85% under ¥100. 3.5 Visualize flavor distribution with a bar chart and a word‑cloud, emphasizing popular flavors such as lava, five‑nut, egg‑yolk lotus‑seed paste and red‑bean paste.

The analysis concludes that certain flavors dominate the market and that most mooncakes are priced affordably, providing actionable insights for sellers and marketers.