Amazon Is Capturing Bigger Slice of U.S. Online Holiday Spending

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-12-16/amazon-is-capturing-bigger-slice-of-u-s-online-holiday-spending

by gmays • 11 years ago

49 63 11 years ago

I shopped for Christmas on Amazon, it was kind of a pain. I had to ship it all to myself, wrap it, put on gift notes and then pack it all up and ship it all to my family across the country. I was going to do their individual gift wrapping but it was $6 PER ITEM. Considering I got about 15 items, that really adds up.

I think I'll still do some shopping on there next year, I just wish they had cheaper gift wrapping and card options.

x5n13• 11 years ago

$90 .. meh, a lot of people would see the value in that.

HorizonXP• 11 years ago

Problem is that Amazon's gift wrapping is crap. They just throw it into a blue felt bag and attach a gift note.

chrisparsons• 11 years ago

The cost of reshipping + cost of wrapping + cost of time of wrapping is probably getting close to $6 an item.

randycupertino2• 11 years ago

That's a very good point.

zitterbewegung• 11 years ago

How much time did it take for you to wrap it? I usually say for myself if I were paying myself minimum wage and it exceeds that then I rather pay someone else.

chrischen2• 11 years ago

People usually would only be paid minimum wage for the hours they work in a day (~8). So just pretend you gift wrap after those hours, where you are paid $0/hr.

mmmBacon2• 11 years ago

The biggest savings of Christmas shopping on Amazon is not having to go to a physical store to do the shopping. No driving around wasting hours in traffic, waiting in lines, and dealing with cranky people. The added benefit is that Amazon also usually has the thing you are looking for too. So if you add up all that time saved, time spent wrapping is really not that bad.

lotsofpulp• 11 years ago

It's really the biggest saving of shopping online, period. I would pay a great deal more to not have to stand in a line and get stuck behind someone pulling out coupons and a checkbook and doing a price check at a checkout aisle in a store.

Physical stores can't even implement the obviously better solution of getting everyone in one queue, and then directing them to the next open register (except for TJ Maxx and Marshalls and a couple others)

gozur882• 11 years ago

I remember just dreading Christmas shopping before Amazon. Sitting in traffic jams on the way to the mall, driving around in circles for an hour waiting for someone to leave, then getting jostled by hordes of rude strangers while looking at products - would my mother like this chrome unicorn maybe not but I need to get the hell out of here before I punch somebody.

Wrapping is a cinch compared to all that.

rconti2• 11 years ago

Considering what USPS, FedEx, and UPS charge us plebes without a corporate account, I'm surprised you could even ship 5 packages for under $90 ($6*15), let alone all 15 items.

Not to mention the cost of standing in line. I spent 30min at the post office mailing a SINGLE package back in mid-December.. and I thought I was ahead of the christmas game!

pmorici• 11 years ago

Why would you stand in line at the post office to ship something? Buy and print the labels at home using something like Paypal's shipping url[0] if you don't have any idea about the weight use flat rate boxes. Fedex has a similar flat rate box shipping with their "OneRate" rates. Then all you are doing at the shipping place is dropping packages off so there is no line waiting.

[0] https://www.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_ship-now

scoot• 11 years ago

"I shopped for Christmas on Amazon, it was kind of a pain. I had to ship it all to myself, wrap it, put on gift notes and then pack it all up and ship it all to my family across the country."

I'm struggling to understand how that is any more of a pain than trawling around town to find appropriate gifts, then completing those very same steps. And with Amazon, you at least have the option of their (admittedly overpriced and ugly) gift wrap.

jedberg• 11 years ago

(overpriced and ugly)

My parents bought my daughter a present and got the gift wrapping option and it was this amazing blue velvet gift sack. We saved it so we can use it again it was so nice. In fact, for the $6 my parents paid, we couldn't get a bag that nice ourselves.

I guess my point is, YMMV.

hnnicker• 11 years ago

I opted to have Amazon gift wrap and ship directly to my sister this year. The surprise was that what she opened was not what I ordered. I'm guessing they have a gift wrap station and once it was wrapped, it looked just like the other gifts, so the wrong one got put into the shipping box to my sister.

The return process does not handle this well.

bbarn• 11 years ago

The replies to this post are all quite analytical and focused on the value proposition gift wrapping gives you.

I know it's more expensive to do it myself, but it's one of the few things I'm truly terrible at, and my family/friends all seem to derive great joy from my lack of skill, so I have begun to enjoy it myself.

I guess if I were concerned about the value of the cost of having someone else gift wrap a present for me, I would be more concerned about why I didn't care enough to do it myself but felt the need to purchase something for them. The only gift wrapping I paid for was 10$, and from Rapha, a high end cycling clothing company - because they give you a fantastic magnetic closing box with special tissue wrapping on everything inside it. (and I still put the entire gift wrapped box in shitty target brand wrapping paper anyway)

Fjolsvith• 11 years ago

For me, Amazon is the way to go. I live an hour from the nearest Walmart or department store. The FedEx and UPS delivery people know me really well.

yial• 11 years ago

Where do you live? I didn't realize places that remote still existed! (Only partially joking)

mdergosits• 11 years ago

There are plenty of places like that. I go to school in upstate NY and while I live in a decent sized town, there are plenty of towns inbetween there and NYC that are pretty barebones.

ivank• 11 years ago

Amazon provides an incredibly valuable 3 month return policy during the holidays (buy on Nov 1, return window ends on Jan 31). This is particularly useful when buying a bunch of computer parts that might exhibit failures after more than a month.

chrischen2• 11 years ago

Failures should be covered under warranty, for any case that warrants a return.

rickyc091• 11 years ago

They have an incredible return policy period. I've had items that I bought, completely forgot about, contacted them a year later and they gave me a full refund, shipping and all. Granted, I do have over 200 orders from them in the past year.

thesimon• 11 years ago

Their return policy is really great during the holidays, which might contribute to it.

As a (late) holiday shopper and Prime member, their shipping guarantees are top notch though. No praying that it arrives in time.

(Whereas Amazon says, order within x hours for delivery tomorrow, a lot of other shops here just feel like "Usually shipped within 1-2 days, if your hair is green, Tom is working in the office and your order number ends with 4")

jacobolus• 11 years ago

Unfortunately I had several things in my Amazon cart which said “order within 8 hours and it arrives December 24” (or whatever), that when I looked back at 3 hours later had lost the guarantee, and now could only promise to arrive by the 26th/27th.

Didn’t turn out to be a big deal, but folks shouldn’t take those guarantees for granted.

sokoloff• 11 years ago

I have seen that as well, and believe it to be genuine/OK. I take it to mean that the warehouse nearest you has it in stock and if you add to your cart and order it, you'll get it by that promised deadline.

If a few hours pass and in the meantime that warehouse sells out, you might be past the cutoff for the next warehouse that has it in stock.

(Not an Amazon employee, just an extremely frequent customer...)

Except for the USPS last-mile shipments, I've rarely (< 5%) had Amazon miss a guaranteed delivery date. On USPS last-mile shipments, they only seem to make about 2 in 3 on-time, which means I get a free month of Prime everytime they miss. I'm almost to the point of trying to figure out the pattern that gets last mile USPS to pickup free months instead of doing the "no rush" which only nets me $1 or $2 towards e-books and video rentals.

xirdstl• 11 years ago

I suppose for me it just matters the guarantee at the time of checkout. Many conditions can change between the time I put it in my cart and when I checkout, especially around Christmas.

The precision with which they can tell me when to expect a package at checkout is definitely an advantage over shopping elsewhere.

nodamage• 11 years ago

In this situation it's likely that the item was being sold by multiple suppliers, and the original supplier you were looking at sold out so it switched to another, presumably at a warehouse further away from your house.

marincounty• 11 years ago

I went with BestBuy this year, and was pleasantly surprised. I've noticed Amazon is slowly raising prices. I'm not knocking it; just like the competition.

Plus--I've always liked Bestbuy. I bought a iPad mini ($under 350.00) at 12:59 p.m. Pacific time, on the 23rd of December. For $12.00 it was delivered to my door at 11 a.m. the next day.

goldenkey• 11 years ago

I've noticed the same thing. Walmart.com often has cheaper prices than Amazon.com for the same item. Walmart's selection is a little more narrow. But it definitely pays to comparison shop if you have a bit of time.

gozur882• 11 years ago

Yeah, you can't just assume Amazon is price competitive any more. I think they're trying to rely more on convenience, like with two hour shipping, to move product.

Animats• 11 years ago

Say goodbye to brick and mortar retail.

"There's always parking at Sears."[1] (Yes, Sears is that desperate.)

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLmu98-wkmk

guelo• 11 years ago

Amazon's product search is amazingly bad and the user reviews are getting faker over time. To me it's amazingly hard to shop on there. Feels like the engineering team is focused on their many other businesses and ignoring their retail stores.

wildmusings• 11 years ago

The fake reviews are really frustrating. I try to work around it by focusing on longer reviews that discuss both pros and cons, but fake review writers are probably getting more sophisticated too. It'd be nice to have separate averages for verified purchasers and real name reviews, since those would at least cost more to rig. One could write a script for that, so long as Amazon doesn't throttle/block you. Sounds like a fun and useful small project.

moultano• 11 years ago

Right now the practice is for the manufacturer to give people a refund on the product in exchange for their 5 star review. It is infuriating. Amazon should ban these companies from the store or they may lose me as a customer (and I buy nearly everything there.)

willis77• 11 years ago

The fact that they haven't implemented a useful ratings sort drives me nuts.

http://www.evanmiller.org/how-not-to-sort-by-average-rating....

pbreit• 11 years ago

I've often thought "Net Promoter Score" counting might work better. Usually a 10 point scale but on 5 point: 5 = +1, 4 = 0, 0-3 = -1, average.

libraryatnight• 11 years ago

I rarely read reviews there and almost never search in any general way. So, I can't say I've noticed this problem. Usually Amazon is where I go for something specific I already know I want -- I've already heard of it, researched it, and just want it at a decent price and shipped fast. Perhaps others are the same as myself and not really noticing. Google, blogs, aggregate discussion sites, friends, social networks, etc I feel like are where I learn about products - Amazon is just where I pull the trigger.

colmvp• 11 years ago

After watching Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief, I decided to check out Dianetics by L. Ron Hubbard on Amazon. 67% of raters gave it 5 stars.

ars• 11 years ago

Is that so strange? The people most likely to buy that book probably already like it before even reading it.

An ordinary person is very unlikely to read it, much less buy it.

magic_man• 11 years ago

You can use google to search amazon. It works pretty well imo.

zenlikethat• 11 years ago

No surprise there. This year I did almost all of my shopping on Amazon and it worked out excellently, especially considering that I was having Christmas in another location and just got everything delivered straight there.

Our family also discovered something great this year: Wishlists. By creating and sharing Wishlists we were all able to get a much better picture of the specific items and areas of gifts that each family member was interested in. It results in much more lucid shopping than blind guesses and/or plain text communication.

ghshephard• 11 years ago

Likewise - I wanted to get my mother a new computer - (a NUC PC, SSD, Memory, HD, Anti-Static Strap, CD Drive, USB Keyboard).

I was able to get everything I wanted shipped in 4 days to 100 Mile House British Columbia, including Clearing Customs, from amazon.com, not even amazon.ca. No worries about carrying packages while traveling, was able to specify everything exactly as I wanted.

There is zero chance I would have been able to do something exactly like that in the local computer shop (The Source), and probably wouldn't have been able to do it in Vancouver at the large computer retailers.

bdcravens• 11 years ago

Amazon feels like more of a crapshoot all the time. Just bought a pricey Thunderbolt dock. Didn't see anything I plugged into it, despite being new. Went to MicroCenter, paid $50 more for same one, worked great. (even tried new cable on Amazon unit, just in case that was the problem)

My point isn't a story about a particular product, but to say that I'm not as surprised as I once was. During the holidays I had two boxes of food etc delivered (one Prime Pantry, one regular purchase) that were busted open or otherwise required my cleanup.

Amazon is truly becoming the online Walmart: cheap, compelling, but you expect the worst.

bsder• 11 years ago

The article is comparing Amazon to, for example, Walmart online. Not Amazon to Walmart sales in general.

pnwhyc• 11 years ago

This doesn't come as a surprise. Amazon has created fantastic consumer and merchant experiences and brought buyer friction down to almost nothing.

I'll be interested to see how they plan to tackle the in-store experience. There are obviously the perishable aspects of grocery store products which, with intense and continual establishment of their current strategies, will eventually present opportunity to become a viable part of the company. But on another end of things, shopping as a hobby is something to overcome. No amount of UX or UI (in current stages, at least) can compare to the coveted experience that shoppers seek when going to a mall. This is an area where Amazon might find value in AR. Ex. being able to try on an outfit without leaving your house.

An obvious method would be to open their own physical stores but that would probably just be a "tiller on the car" fix.

Whatever direction the company goes, I look forwards to seeing what Amazon has in store. (Seriously though, no pun intended.)

rpgmaker• 11 years ago

Am I the only one who thinks their site is bloated and slow? I mean, it works but it's not that pleasant to use.

Amazon Is Capturing Bigger Slice of U.S. Online Holiday Spending

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