What is Typical Amazon Spending? How Not to Ask

Knowing what the typical US Amazon customer spends in a year and how that changes over time is a critical piece of the Amazon puzzle. If we asked Amazon customers how much they spend at Amazon in a year, at best they would start calculating and estimating, and to some extent, they would try to guess what the “right answer” is. That would not be good.

Instead, we ask customers about their most recent Amazon order. Those questions are factual and easy to answer, and experience has proven that they provide accurate reports on those most recent shopping trips. With a large sample of survey subjects, that becomes a reliable representation of US Amazon orders.

We analyze those responses to look at the number of items per order, the average price of an item, and the average dollar value of an order. We also ask shoppers about order frequency (a few times a week, once a week, a few times a month, etc.) and use that to calculate the average annual number of orders.

Together that data allows us to estimate what the typical US Amazon customer spends per year. For the twelve months ending March 2025, that figure is $1,000, up from $960 for the twelve months ending March 2024 (Table 1). The breakdown of the component factors explains the potentially inflation-driven increase.