Amazon seems to be the I’m a Celebrity of the retail world in that they can’t stay out of the news. The retail group have made multiple headlines this week due to their alleged employment violations, drone testing and their massive financial success over Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
Amazon’s Best ever day
On “Cyber Monday”, the peak online shopping day before Christmas, Amazon UK sold 47 items per second racking up 4.1 million sales. Their most successful shopping day every peaked at 9.22pm with Kindles topping the best selling lists as well as one million clothing sales over the previous week, a long way from their humble book-selling origins. To meet this massive demand one lorry had to leave each of Amazon’s eight fulfilment centres every two minutes.
Amazon controversies in the news
Last week the nation saw the Panorama expose on Amazon’s working conditions, revealing how warehouse employees must correctly scan an appropriate number of objects per hour or face disciplinary action and are expected to walk up to ten miles per shift. Then the Guardian also planted a reporter in an Amazon warehouse with similar issues raised. Then on monday the company grabbed more headlines with their drone testing. Furthermore MP’s are encouraging online shoppers to boycott Amazon due to their tax structuring.
Whilst these reports were hitting the press, coupled with ongoing issues for small retailers who feel they are being squeezed form the market, the UK shopper continued to spend millions at Amazon.co.uk
Amazon’s continued, uninhibited success
At the exasperation of online competitors this negativity for Amazon has not deterred the UK shopper on little bit. This dominance can be seen by Amazon’s share of the retail industry where they leave competitors in their wake.
Chart 1) below shows that over the last two months Amazon has seen sharp rises in its share of traffic in the lead up to Christmas, overtaking Ebay from the 25th November when the Panorama expose was released. No matter what the likes of John Lewis, Argos and Tesco do in their Christmas build-up, Amazon it seems is unstoppable.
Chart 1: Weekly Market Share of Traffic – All Industries
Amazon are ideally placed this year and many years to come
Christmas now is all about the handheld electronic device. As we see from the chart below for the hottest product searches in the US, we have an absolute craving for all things shiny and electronic. A couple of years ago one in ten UK presents was a Kindle. As tablets, e-readers and games consoles top the hot products Christmas lists of 2013 we can see a conflation of Christmas and the purchase of electrical goods.
Chart 2: Hot Product Searches for Christmas – Hitwise US
The battle to be most searched product is being competed by Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo, Amazon itself and Apple. But which site is the main recipient of all these searches? Yes you’ve guessed it…. Amazon.
The Hottest Product searches are most likely to end with an Amazon click
Amazon will probably have its best Christmas ever this year and that is based on 3 of the most desired products for the UK shoppers; Xbox One, Playstation4 and The Kindle. Based on Hitwise UK’s statistics, Amazon are already receiving a huge share of searches for these major products.
It is even about to gain more traffic than Microsoft and Sony for their respective products (being the owners, they obviously already get the Kindle’s traffic).
As we can see Amazon is gaining 16.41% of the click through traffic for the Xbox One and 9.89% for Play Station 4.
The greater share for Amazon from X Box One searches is likely to be down to its earlier release date – as after a week of release the promotional hype from official sources has died down and the rush to purchase is now taking over.
Chart 3: Share of Traffic for the search term “PS4″ – UK
Chart 4: Share of Traffic for the search term “Xbox One” – UK
The chart below shows that Amazon is catching Microsoft in terms of share of traffic for the term “Xbox One”
Chart 5: Top websites receiving traffic for the search term “Xbox one” – UK
Chart 6: Share of Traffic for the search term “Kindle” – UK
Yes Amazon do own Kindle, but it is still remarkable that a retailer can consistently also be the biggest producer of a product and thus garnering benefit whoever the searcher lands on.
Amazon’s Search Positions are as impressive as ever
As we wrote here, UK shoppers love buying books, music and electrical products online, more so than other industries.
Amazon is the major player in every category.
One of the reasons Amazon performs so well is its consistently impressive SEO presence and for the major Hot Product searches above, it significantly outperforms its competitors. Here we look at just one sector – consoles, but be assured that a large percentage of this year’s top tens for books, videos and music will all be purchased on Amazon too.
The chart 6) below shows the visibility scores across multiple sites for a Search Term Group of game consoles (this group consists of all the major consoles from Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony). Amazon far outstrips its nearest rival with a 70 out of 100 score across 20 search terms.
Chart 7: Visibility Index. search visibility scores across multiple sites for a Search Term Group “Consoles”
When looking at the individual search term positions across this Search Term Group for “consoles”, Amazon is winning the battle hands down. The chart below shows separate search term positions in Google UK.
Chart 8: Position Index. Individual positions for Amazon.co.uk in Google UK for selected search terms
This dominance of search positions in Google is repeated across electrical items, DVDs, music, books and many many more categories – across many countries – this dominance is seemingly, at least for now, impenetrable.