More Evidence that Amazon is Really a Convenience Store

We’ve recently come to the conclusion that Amazon.com really is a convenience store - albeit one with 100,000 times more items than the one at the corner. That is not a criticism but actually a compliment. Convenience, along with price, quality, service, and selection are the ways US consumers measure retailers.

This framing does mean rethinking some basic ideas about Amazon, however. Unlike other retailers, we need not analyze the “shopping cart”, where customers select multiple items and observers seek to understand their relationships, or as at least one convenience store says, identify the “go withs”. At Amazon, even shopping for groceries (outside of Amazon Fresh) becomes a process of buying individual items as needs arise, rather than building a list for a single visit to a physical store.

Warehouse clubs and mass merchants have succeeded in teaching US consumers to buy across categories in a single shopping trip. A cart with ice cream, sweatpants, a skateboard, and numerous other items is not out of the question. In contrast, CIRP consumer surveys show clearly how US Amazon customers buy narrowly in a given order. Rather than including items from multiple departments in an order (“visit” in traditional retail), Amazon customers focus on a single area of need for each order.

CIRP estimates in 2024, US Amazon customers purchased from an average of 1.2 departments in their most recent order (Chart 1). This number has remained relatively stable over the past five or so years, after decreasing steadily from about 1.5 departments in 2014, when CIRP first surveyed Amazon.com customers.