Amazon Set to Overtake Walmart in Beauty
According to Business of Fashion, Amazon is set to make up 14.5% of the beauty market by 2025 to become the largest Beauty retailer by 2025, thus overtaking Walmart who are set to own 13% of the market by 2025. Amazon have set their eyes on greater ownership of the beauty category for a number of years now with a combination of mass and luxury brands selling products to consumers.
Due to Amazon’s recognised dominance, I was surprised to hear that they hadn’t already overtaken Walmart who currently own the lion share. When we look to the online space, Amazon are already a clear leader when we compare the two. To quote Forbes “Where one is weak, the other is strong” which has come from a recent article on the two retailers, this means that whilst Amazon have an incredibly strong online retail presence, Walmart are equally as strong offline with 90% of Americans living within 10 miles of a Walmart store.
This trend is driven through the expectation of more consumers purchasing beauty products online which is set to hit 45% by 2025.
Amazon have long been dominant over Walmart in the online space with Walmart making up a fraction of it’s size for a number of categories. Isolating a popular product type in the Beauty category such as “shampoo”, we can see that Amazon get 5X the amount of traffic to pages related to “shampoo”.
Walmart is still a massive opportunity for a number of brands and there is still room for them to challenge in the online space as it’s a clear area for growth. Based on Amazon’s current dominance, it’s integral for beauty brands to ensure that their Amazon sales channel is optimised and works effectively with future growth.
