What About Casual Amazon Shoppers?

It’s hard to believe, but not everyone shops at Amazon all the time.

We spend a lot of time considering Amazon’s best customers, analyzing what they buy, their Prime membership tendencies, and how else they engage with Amazon. We’ve shown that Amazon has become something of a convenience store for them, where they buy everything they need as they need it, rather than bundling purchases into a single shopping trip.

Some Amazon customers shop less frequently. CIRP data indicates almost one-quarter of US Amazon customers order from Amazon less than monthly. We wondered what those customers look like. As it turns out, they’re somewhat similar to frequent customers, with some notable differences.

We looked at two important attributes of these relatively infrequent Amazon customers: how much they spend on an average order, and how many items they buy. The amount spent ($43) was about the same as the $45 frequent customers (those that order from Amazon monthly or more frequently) spend on an average order. (Chart 1). While the averages are the same, there are differences in the range of orders that drive them.