Amazon Customers Could Shop More at Whole Foods

Amazon bought Whole Foods six years ago, as a way to accelerate its bumpy move into groceries. Setting aside the uneven financial performance, we want to know a more basic question: how well has Amazon done in persuading Amazon customers to shop at Whole Foods?

Amazon has over 200 million regular customers in the US. And more importantly, many of Amazon’s 170 million Prime members do pretty much anything Amazon proposes. We analyzed the crossover into Whole Foods shopping.

Only one-third of Amazon customers (those who bought from Amazon in the 90 days prior to the survey) have ever shopped at Whole Foods (Chart 1). We can compare this to the two leading grocery and discount retailers, Target and Walmart. Almost 80% of Amazon customers have ever shopped at Target, while over 90% of them have shopped at Walmart.