An eCommerce Year in Review: Jumpshot Reveals Retail Winners, Losers and Amazon Data Report

Amazon drove 1.59B transactions in 2018, while competitors either struggled or thrived with online sales


SAN FRANCISCO, Jan. 31, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Jumpshot, the only company that unlocks walled garden data, today released the Retail Winners, Losers and Amazon Data Report, highlighting that brick-and-mortar-focused retailers, like Office Depot, posted mixed results online while online-focused niche players, such as Etsy and Wayfair, made strides. Jumpshot studied anonymous consumer actions within 500 eCommerce sites and marketplaces from 2017 through 2018, analyzing visits and transactions for different brand categories across these sites.


Major takeaways from the report include:

  • Walmart.com, Target.com and Macys.com showed strong growth and won more-than-respectable market share in some categories
  • Offline woes for Toys "R" Us and Sears matched online performance, and other vulnerable retailers like Best Buy, Barnes & Noble and Office Depot could be next if they can’t find a way to survive the Amazon era
  • Online-focused retailers Etsy, Chewy and Wayfair made strong improvements in 2018, growing their online transactions by double digit percentages and carving out retail niches for themselves
  • Amazon continues to dominate eCommerce, with more than 70 percent market share of online transactions in more than a dozen categories, with continued stable growth and a thriving search platform that is driving billions in quarterly revenue
  • Across 23 major top-level product categories, Amazon took more than 70 percent of online transactions in 15 of them
  • Amazon.com drove 1.59B transactions in 2018, showing two percent growth year-over-year
  • The 33.6M incremental year-over-year transactions Amazon drove in 2018 would be enough to make them the 5th largest eCommerce retailer in the US, ahead of Target.com, HomeDepot.com and Kohls.com
  • The rate at which product views were driven by sponsored search on Amazon.com grew 58 percent from January to December 2018

"Amazon continues to dominate eCommerce, growing more in Q4 2018 than other major retailers sold during the entire year," said Stephen Kraus, Ph.D., head of digital insights at Jumpshot. "Still, Amazon isn’t invincible. Some brick-and-mortar-based competitors like Walmart and Target grew strongly online as they begin to master omni-channel marketing, and Amazon continues to see strong challengers in categories such as Apparel, Furniture and Pet Supplies.”

Additional report findings:

Brands and Retailers Who Couldn’t Make It Happen in 2018

  • Jet.com is losing its distinct identity.
    • Transactions on Jet.com are down 56 percent year-over-year
    • Paid search traffic has fallen from 17.4M visits in Q1 2017 to under 4M in Q3 2018

  • Barnes & Noble’s online declines outpace physical declines.
    • Barnes and Noble had mixed overall retail performance, reporting a decline in same-store sales of 5.4 percent in 2018
    • Despite a strong December, digital sales fared worse; transactions on BarnesandNoble.com fell 9.1 percent in 2018

  • Brick-and-mortar-focused stores struggle to compete with Amazon.
    • As more video game sales move online, GameStop has been able to grow its digital transactions, posting a 17 percent increase in 2018 -- but Amazon still dominates online sales in the Video Game category, with more than 80 percent share of all transactions
    • Toys "R" Us struggled against Amazon as 2.4M users who viewed products in the Toys & Video Games category on ToysRUs.com ended up buying toys or video games on Amazon instead, a loss worth 80 percent of all Toys "R" Us transactions for the category
    • Traffic to Sears.com declined every month of the year in 2018, despite an increase in a reliance on paid Google search to bring visitors to the site
    • OfficeDepot.com only takes about three percent of office product sales online since Amazon.com takes a massive 84 percent, Walmart.com takes four percent, and last but not least, Staples.com takes three percent
    • Transactions on BestBuy.com, who has about four percent share of transactions in the Electronics Category, were substantially worse, down 22 percent for all categories for the year

Brands and Retailers that Outperformed the Competition or Expectations in 2018

  • Etsy shows strong growth, especially in its strongest category.
    • Transactions on Etsy.com grew 20 percent year-over-year in 2018, with its conversion rate surging 15 percent
    • In the Jewelry and Accessories category, Etsy’s 50 percent year-over-year growth outpaces the leading retailers in the category
    • Traffic from paid search grew 43 percent year-over-year, indicating Etsy and its sellers can use Google to compete for attention with other retailers

  • Wayfair is growing, and winning market share from Amazon and competitors.
    • Transactions on Wayfair.com have surged 38 percent year-over-year
    • Wayfair has increased its share of furniture transactions steadily for the last 24 months, growing from under seven percent in January 2017 to more than 14 percent at the peak of the holiday shopping season in November 2018

  • Some retailers are able to compete with Amazon.
    • Though it’s still second to Amazon overall, Walmart.com’s growth in 2018 outpaced amazon.com in five major CPG categories (Household Essentials, Personal Care, Pets, Food, and Beauty)
    • In 2018, Macy’s drove 20 percent more online transactions than in 2017
    • Especially strong for Target.com were the Boys’ and Girls’ Clothing categories, which saw 63 percent, and 43 percent growth, respectively
    • Chewy.com drove a 53 percent increase in sales, year-over-year, and Dog Food transactions have grown 40 percent and Cat Food transactions 69 percent -- this has all led to Chewy.com getting a 38 percent market share of Dog Food transactions, and now amazon.com has a relatively smaller 51 percent market share in the same category

To download the full report, please visit: http://go.jumpshot.com/retail-winners-and-losers-lp.html

About Jumpshot:

Jumpshot delivers digital intelligence from within the Internet's most valuable walled gardens. The company's real-time, anonymized global panel tracks five billion actions a day across 100 million devices to deliver insights into online consumer behavior. Jumpshot works with customers including Unilever, Microsoft, IBM, Google, Yelp, Condé Nast and TripAdvisor, among others. Learn more about Jumpshot at www.jumpshot.com.


            

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