Holiday shoppers favor Amazon
Amazon.com is increasing its share of U.S. online spending during the holiday season, even as WalMart Stores, Target and other rivals seek to attract consumers with promotional sales and free deliveries.
Amazon took in 39.3 percent of e-commerce spending from Nov. 1 through Dec. 6, up from 37.9 percent during the same period a year earlier, according to Slice Intelligence, which gathers data through email receipts of 3.5 million shoppers. You’d have to combine the Web sales of the next 21 retailers, including Wal-Mart, Target, Best Buy, Macy’s Home Depot, Nordstrom and Costco Wholesale, to match Amazon’s share, Slice data shows.
Amazon has spent almost two decades and billions of dollars building a network of warehouses and shipping hubs in 69 U.S. cities specifically designed to deliver merchandise to homes and businesses. After getting online shoppers accustomed to two-day deliveries, the Web retailer is pushing to grab a bigger chunk of sales from brick-and-mortar stores. Amazon upped the ante this year by expanding its one-hour Prime Now delivery service to big cities. Total online shopping is on track to climb 11 percent in November and December to $95.5 billion, according to Forrester Research.
“Jeff Bezos was beaten up for a long time about the infrastructure investments he made and the drain on profitability it caused,” said Ken Cassar, vice president of analytics solutions at Slice. “He is seeing the payoff on those investments.”
Data from ChannelAdvisor, which helps 2,900 merchants sell goods on various online marketplaces, also indicates that Amazon continues to increase its share of online spending. Merchants using ChannelAdvisor software to sell on Amazon’s marketplace saw sales jump 19.5 percent in the second week of December, faster than the overall 15 percent e-commerce growth rate.