Amazon maintains holiday dominance

Amazon.com Inc. maintained its online dominance in the 2017 Christmas shopping season despite increasing competition from Wal-Mart Stores Inc., Target Corp. and Best Buy Co.

Amazon captured 89 percent of online spending among dominant holiday retailers in the five-week period beginning on Thanksgiving, according to an analysis of credit- and debit-card transaction data by Earnest Research in New York. Wal-Mart, which purchased the Jet.com e-commerce company in 2016 for $3 billion, remained a distant second a 4.4 percent.

The data show market share has changed little from a year ago even as more spending shifts online. That suggests stores are keeping their customers, even as more shoppers shift their spending to the stores’ websites, said Andrew Robson, president and chief revenue officer at Earnest. Traditional retailers have been trying to match Amazon’s strength by offering more products online and adding new services like letting shoppers find and purchase goods on the Web and pick them up at nearby stores.

Wal-Mart traditionally sees a sales bump after Christmas because of clearance discounts, which could improve its final totals, he said.

Earnest measures total spending for each retailer based on anonymous consumer transactions. The spending totals for Seattle-based Amazon measure gross merchandise value, or the price of all goods sold on the site. That figure is bigger than Amazon’s total revenue because many of the products come from independent merchants and Amazon takes a commission on the sale. Bentonville-based Wal-Mart is also building its online marketplace model and measures sales by gross merchandise value.