The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Last-minute shoppers rely more only on Amazon
SEATTLE — Olivia Zimmermann started her holiday shopping early this year, buying a Bluetooth speaker from Best Buy for her sister. It was supposed to arrive by Dec. 10, two weeks before Christmas.
The speaker never showed up — and the post office said it had delivered the package to a different town. Best Buy apologized and offered to reship it. But Zimmermann, who works in marketing in Chicago, was over it.
“I just want a refund,” she told the retailer, and then added: “At this point, I have already ordered from Amazon because I know for a fact it will be here when they say it will.”
Amazon is far and away the leader in e-commerce, outpacing competitors like Walmart, Target and eBay. But its dominance is never more pronounced than in the nail-biter last-minute sprint before Christmas.
The company has had a two-decade-long obsession with shrinking the time from click to doorstep. It has built warehouses in more than 30 states and a sophisticated web of delivery methods, giving it a logistical advantage.
Amazon has used that edge to lead people to expect near instant gratification that, for a while, only it could deliver. The company built trust in its delivery speed with its Prime membership, which costs $119 a year and includes two-day shipping. This year in the days leading up to Christmas, Amazon’s share of online sales will increase by almost 50 percent — to about half of all digital sales — while most rivals fade, according to the market research firm Rakuten Intelligence.
“Amazon’s ability to fulfill more quickly and effectively than competitors has been a key differentiator back to the earliest days,” said Kenneth Cassar, an analyst with Rakuten Intelligence, which is an independent subsidiary of the Japanese e-retailer Rakuten.
Traditional retailers still enjoy strong sales when the holiday season begins around Thanksgiving. They advertise widely, luring shoppers with doorbuster deals. The promotions also drive sales to their websites instead of Amazon. Around Thanksgiving, Amazon’s share of online sales can dip to as low as 20 percent in the United States, according to Rakuten.
But as November turns to December, and then into Christmas crunchtime, shoppers’ preferences change. Last year, Walmart and Target had their busiest online traffic of the month on Dec. 10. Amazon’s was eight days later, on Dec. 18, according to an analysis by Griffin Carlborg, a researcher at the digital intelligence firm Gartner L2.
“Amazon has just built up its reputation around rapid fulfillment incredibly well,” Carlborg
said. “Customers really trust Amazon’s fulfillment offerings.”
Those shoppers include Carissa Vinovskis, 26, who puts in 12-hour days researching diabetes at Children’s Hospital Colorado. She used to shop for Christmas gifts in stores, but as she got busy with graduate school and later her job, she had less time and patience.
Panic set in fast in the middle of this month when Vinovskis realized she had just six days to get presents before visiting her parents. She found a few cute things on Etsy — “beautiful, handcrafted gifts,” she said — and then realized they would take about four weeks to arrive.
“I was like, welp, Amazon Prime it is!” she said.
An Amazon spokeswoman pointed to a statement in which the vice president who runs Prime, Cem Sibay, said, “We keep working to add faster and even more convenient delivery options.”
Walmart and others have also made strides in catching the wave of shoppers moving online by making similar delivery promises without the cost of a Prime membership. (In the third quarter, Walmart’s online sales rose 43 percent over the previous year.) A Google search for the retailer on Wednesday returned “Walmart Last Minute Gifts | Get ’em by Christmas | Free 2-Day Shipping” for the name of the company’s home page.
These traditional retailers are leveraging their physical stores — a key advantage they have over Amazon — and providing ways for people to order online and pick up in person. That is particularly powerful in the final days before Christmas, when shoppers return to stores.
“The biggest area that we’re playing offense right now is with our stores,” Marc Lore, who runs Walmart’s U.S. e-commerce business, told investors in October.
Amazon is faster than every major competitor, though other retailers are speeding up. In 2016, Old Navy, which is owned by Gap, took about 10 days to deliver a package ordered during the week after Thanksgiving, Rakuten data shows. This year, its packages showed up about three days faster. Walmart cut its delivery time from more than a week to six days over the same period. And Best Buy said 80 percent of its small packages now arrive in two days or under.