With Amazon Prime Day Looming, New Report Reveals CPG and Retailer Impact

Research from Numerator shows online shopping event pulls from other retailers, helps participating CPGs gain share

5/26/2021

With Amazon Prime Day Looming, New Report Reveals CPG and Retailer Impact

Amazon Prime Day is coming in June, with positive implications for CPGs and other retailers.

It looks like Amazon’s Prime Day is happening in June, returning to its traditional summer date after a pandemic-related pushback to October in 2020. While shoppers anticipate discounts and competing stores gear up to counter with sales of their own, a new report highlights the effect of the online shopping event on consumer packaged good (CPG) sales and other retailers.

According to research from data and tech company Numerator, Amazon’s day-of share of CPG sales during the Prime Day event (usually held for two days) increased five-fold over the preceding month for the last three years of the event. Likewise, participating CPGs’ day-of share on Amazon has risen on each successive Prime Day, with a high leap of 14.8% on Prime Day in 2020.

Numerator’s data shows that Prime Day siphons the most from smaller retailers, who posted collective share declines of 8.9% during that time span. For larger retailers, although sales in physical stores dipped during Prime Day 2020, many of those stores’ online stores got a slight lift from consumers who were doing a bit of comparison shopping. For example, Target.com saw an increase in CPG share of 0.2% versus the previous month and Walmart.com and Costco.com both experienced a 0.1% uptick.

The new report cites CPG categories that are mainly impacted by Amazon Prime Day, including health and beauty, household products, pet and baby care. Overall, the grocery sector is the smallest Amazon CPG share heading into this year's Prime Day, coming in at 0.9% year-to-date in 2021, a .5% rise from 2018. That compares to the baby sector, with a 21.4% 2021 YTD CPG share, health and beauty at 17.9%, pet at 13.6% and household products at 8.7%. Health and beauty had the biggest bump from 2018 to 2021, up six percentage points.

As for who is buying on Prime Day, Numerator's findings reveal that although all generations contribute to Amazon’s CPG share during the promotion, Millennials shop more. The Baby Boomer generation saw a notable increase in CPG share over the last few years.

The report from Chicago-based Numerator is derived from its TruView omnichannel share data and reflects market share for CPGs.

Seattle-based Amazon is No. 2 on Progressive Grocer’s 2021 PG 100 list of the top food and consumables retailers in North America.