Holiday Shopping at the Amazon Convenience Store
With the holidays upon us and Black Friday approaching, what can we expect from Amazon?
For some retailers the holiday season can account for as much as half of their annual sales. Apparel, home decor, electronics, and more are critical gift categories, so retailers of those products enjoy a significant holiday surge. Even grocery stores see some bump from increased entertaining. Amazon of course competes in all those categories, but Amazon is a very unusual retailer.
As we have sought to show, for Amazon customers Amazon is as much a convenience store as anything else. Despite selling non-convenience products, Amazon ordering mimics convenience shopping, with frequent, relatively small orders. This tendency has an interesting impact on the holiday season at Amazon. We looked at the size of a typical Amazon.com order. Specifically, we compare order size in the fourth calendar quarter of 2023, the holiday shopping season, to order size in the other three quarters of 2023. We found order size increased only slightly in the holiday quarter.
The average US Amazon order in the fourth quarter of 2023 was $48, compared to $45 for the first through third quarters of 2023 (Chart 1). This 7% holiday season differential has remained consistent for the past several years.