Amazon Rolls Out Private-Label Vitamins

The variety of Amazon private-label products continues to grow, adding convenience for brand-loyal Amazon Prime members and causing anxiety for competing eCommerce merchants. Recently, the online retail giant added a new product line to its Amazon Elements brand, which had previously sold only baby wipes (and a line of diapers for a short time back in 2015).

Since the end of February, Amazon has been selling its own line of vitamin supplements.

Amazon Elements now sells Turmeric Root Extract, Calcium Complex, Vitamin D2 and Vitamin K2 supplements—all with ‘transparent origins’. According to the product page, each supplement bottle comes with a QR code that allows buyers to access quality reports, product origins and a list of ingredients. This feature plays into growing consumer interest in knowing the source of products they purchase and their composite ingredients.

According to a report by analytics firm One Click Retail, Amazon has launched over 50 private-label products in the past three months. Sales of Wickedly Prime, Amazon’s private-label food venture, is still small, showing only mild growth and comprising less than 1 percent category share since its debut at the tail end of 2016.

But perhaps online sales of these products aren’t the end goal for e-Commerce giant Amazon. What many of the released private-label products have in common is their readiness to be sold in supermarkets—namely stocking the shelves at Amazon Go.

Consumers still await the public opening of Amazon’s grocery venture, which is expected to come sooner rather than later. And though the 2,000+ store ambitions turned out to be false according to the company, the public opening of Amazon Go may still be the ‘shot heard round the world’ for retail grocers globally, waiting for what seems like the inevitable ‘Amazon Effect‘ to kick in for their market segment. Because when Amazon pursues niches in other markets, even if only in rumors, stocks quickly feel the effects.