Has Amazon Become a Convenience Store?

What does an Amazon shopping trip look like? While the end results are the same, online shopping differs greatly from in-person shopping. And to a large extent, Amazon has defined online shopping and encouraged certain shopping patterns. 

Grocery stores are split between stock-up shopping and fill-in shopping trips, and generally have the most frequent visits. Mass merchants have tried to cross shopping categories, with combined grocery, home, and apparel offerings, using the former to encourage frequent visits. Warehouse clubs in theory garner less frequent visits and compensate with bigger transactions that regularly include disparate categories.

Amazon sells virtually everything, so they primarily compete with the mass merchants, in the vast middle of the retail market. But since Amazon shopping does not require a trip to the store, the typical market basket is very different. Buying one or two items at Walmart or Target is an inefficient use of time. Buying one or two items from Amazon is a quick response to a perceived need.

Because of this, Amazon customers buy relatively few items in each transaction. Almost half bought a single item, while over two-thirds bought two or fewer items (Chart 1). This works out to an average of about 2.2 items per trip.