From Seeking Alpha:
The Christmas shopping season couldn’t have went much better for Amazon, as it generated more sales than it has in its history, and as important for the long term, boosted its Amazon Prime membership at a record level as well.
According to Slice Intelligence, from November 1 through December 16, Amazon captured just under 37 percent of market share of all online purchases. The data was based upon 1.7 million online receipts it collected during that period of time. Amazon kept gaining momentum during the holiday shopping season, boosting share for the week ending December 17 to 45.5 percent.
More important to me was how it captured more Prime memberships than ever before, and if historical responses are similar, it should be able to keep churn down to a minimum once the trial run is over. That suggests even more consumers will be spending a larger portion of their money on products offered from Amazon’s online store for at least the next year, and probably longer.
. . . .
To give an idea of how much Amazon dominated sales from November 1 to December 16, its closest competitor Best Buy wasn’t even able to grab 4 percent of online e-commerce sales. The rest, including Target and Wal-Mart, weren’t able to even produce a market share of 3 percent, with Target having a 2.9 percent share, and Wal-Mart only able to generate a 2.7 percent share of online sales.
By any measure, this is total domination by Amazon.
Link to the rest at Seeking Alpha
“couldn’t have went”
:O
I have a big of a problem with comparing a digital retailer to retailers that have stores, especially well-patronized ones like Walmart, Target, and Best Buy. Amazon pretty much only has online presence (if you discount the very few bookstores they have out there). Those others mentioned sell a lot in actual stores. So, while they may have 3 or 4 percentages of online sales, they will have sold quite a lot during the holiday season in B&M stores. My Walmart and local Target were very busy this holiday season, and, honestly, my local Walmart is ALWAYS busy, as is CostCo and other local retailers. I avoid Walmart like the plague due to the horrible shopping experience in the messy, busy stores–long lines, annoying parking.
BTW, I’ve shopped Target and Walmart online in the past. The experience and shipping speed at Amazon are both hugely superior to that of their competitors. Walmart needs to work on their online user experience and shipping.
I do shop online a lot at Vitacost (for specific vitamin/food items). Why? They are like Amazon: give me good prices, get my items here usually in 3 days (without having to pay for a “prime” type membership).
If they have a great online store, inventory, prices, and search engine,along with excellent delivery, they’ll have customers.
“Went” jumped out at me, too. I’m noticing an increasing confusion of past and past perfect verb forms (notably swim, drink, run) in published (and allegedly edited) fiction and journalism. My fourth grade English teacher is rolling over in her grave.
I did some online shopping at Walmart recently (when, gasp, Amazon didn’t have what I wanted) and was surprised to see that many items listed on their site weren’t even sold by Walmart. It looked like they were third-party sellers like those found on Amazon.
Yes, I noticed that, too, the last couple times. It slapped me in the face when I went to the shopping cart and saw the delivery charge because it wasn’t from Walmart, but a different vendor. Urp.
Yes! The shipping hit me, too. I had filled up a cart with several items, but it turned out they were from a bunch of different vendors, each with its own shipping charge. Didn’t realize it till I clicked thru to pay. That sale was entirely dumped.