Yahoo Finance Millennial men prefer to buy just about everything on Amazon
Amazon is the leading destination for mainstream shoppers, especially millennial men. According to Goldman Sachs and Conde Nast’s 2018 Top Brands & Retailers Millennials Love report, men rank Amazon as their “favorite place to shop” in almost every shopping category. In fact, in every category surveyed, men chose Amazon as their No. 1 or No. 2 retailer.
The collaborative report, which started in 2013, originally focused on women’s brand preferences. For the past two years, the survey included men.
“Amazon leads as a preferred retailer in mainstream fashion, with the platform realizing increased affinity this year in almost all categories across our national sample,” according to the report.
While Nike remains the No. 1 athletic brand for men, the cohort chose Amazon as their preferred shoe retailer this year. Male shoppers tend to stick with what they know and like, rather than seek out new products, therefore they turn to Amazon as their one-stop shop.
“Given their higher affinity for mass product brand lines (such as Axe and Old Spice), we believe this preference is driven by replenishment rather than product discovery,” according to the report.
Amazon has dozens of private labels across nearly every consumer industry, including furniture, athletic wear and baby food, to name a few. Because many of these brands appear to be independent, many consumers may not be aware they are buying from Amazon.
The mobile momentum
The report identifies the move to online shopping as the largest shift in behavior. Twenty-two percent of national survey respondents said they are doing more shopping online, compared to 11% last year.
“The shift online persists as the single biggest change among surveyed consumers, and we find that Amazon is becoming an increasingly dominant retailer in almost every category,” the report said.
More and more consumers are using Amazon’s app to do their shopping. Thirty-five percent of men said Amazon is their favorite shopping app (compared to 29% of women).
“Momentum for the Amazon app appears to be strong — when we asked our national cohort what apps they were using today that they weren’t using much a few months ago, Amazon was the most frequent response,” wrote Goldman analysts. Eleven percent of respondents chose Amazon; Facebook came in second place with 3%.
“Amazon’s progress across apparel categories will mirror its steady press forward in every other category it has prioritized (electronics, media, cloud computing, etc.): start small, leverage third parties, use scale to attract brands, and gradually grow the footprint until any brand not working with it loses access to one of the fastest growing pools of consumer spending,” writes Goldman analyst Heath Terry.
Companies like La-Z-Boy (LZB) have boosted their bottom line by selling their products on competitor sites like Wayfair and Amazon. Just this week fashion retailer J.Crew announced that it would be launching its new Mercantile fall 2018 collection on Amazon. It will be the first time you can shop for J.Crew apparel outside of its own namesake site and stores. Remaining holdouts are likely to succumb to the pressures of Amazon as well.
Melody Hahm is a senior writer at Yahoo Finance, covering entrepreneurship, technology and real estate. Follow her on Twitter @melodyhahm.
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