Remember Showrooming?

In its ascendency, Amazon terrified conventional retailers with a very specific idea: customers would shop in person at Walmart or Target or Best Buy and purchase the exact same product on a smartphone from Amazon.com while standing in the aisle. Retailers tried a number of ways to beat this perceived threat, with some even curtailing Wi-Fi access to cut off smartphones.

Well, showrooming ceased to become a problem for these retailers, but for the wrong reason. Now, Amazon customers rarely even go to a physical store for the things they buy at Amazon.

About 90% of customers did not shop in-person for their most recent Amazon.com purchase (Chart 1). This share has risen gradually over time, from 86% in 2015.