Rakuten: Amazon's share of US online sales can dip to ~20% around Thanksgiving only to soar to ~50% before Christmas, as users trust Amazon to deliver on time
Amazon operates at scale. Tweets: Dare Obasanjo / @carnage4life : Amazon's share of online shopping jumps from 20% to 50% after Black Friday because users trust them to deliver. Wife experienced this buying gifts & holiday party dress from Gap & Nordstrom. Weeks to deliver versus days for Amazon. Bezos gets it done.http://www.nytimes.com/ ...
Context & Ripple Effects
Rakuten's holiday tracking shows a recurring seasonal swing: Amazon's slice of US online sales dips to roughly 20% around Thanksgiving — when shoppers browse broadly across retailers — then surges toward 50% in the final pre-Christmas window, when delivery deadlines force buyers to consolidate with whoever they trust to ship on time. The pattern isn't new: Amazon already took 35.7% of Black Friday 2015 online spending, more than Best Buy, Macy's, Walmart and Nordstrom combined in that snapshot.
What makes the 2018 datapoint durable is how later coverage keeps confirming it. Route package data from the 2024 holidays showed the same shape globally — order volume rising from 21% in the Thanksgiving-Black Friday week to 29% in the two weeks before Christmas — while Rakuten's own pandemic-era numbers showed the flip side: when delivery pressure eased mid-2020, Amazon's share slipped from 42.1% to 38.5% as Target and Walmart picked up ground.
First-order effects
- In the crunch weeks before Christmas, deadline-driven gift buyers abandon slower retailers — the anecdote behind the data is a shopper whose Gap and Nordstrom orders took weeks versus days for Amazon — so department stores and apparel chains effectively cede their highest-intent holiday traffic to Amazon.
Second-order effects
- Rivals' response is forced investment in fulfillment rather than merchandising: matching Amazon's delivery promise becomes the price of staying in the gift market, which is why share trackers increasingly measure route and package volume alongside sales.
Third-order effects
- If the seasonal pattern holds, e-commerce competition converges on logistics reliability as the deciding factor — share migrates each December toward whoever owns the last mile, structurally advantaging Amazon and pushing other retailers toward their own delivery infrastructure or third-party fulfillment dependence.
The trend: Holiday e-commerce share is becoming a function of delivery-trust logistics, with Amazon's peak-season concentration repeating year after year as rivals race to match its shipping promise.