Amazon’s HPC Sales Are On Fire Amid An Overall Industry Slowdown

The health and personal care industry may be seeing declines, but Amazon is reportedly gaining double digital wallet share in the consumables retail category through eCommerce.

That’s according to One Click Retail, which issued a report on the health and personal care category that was covered by Chain Store Age. The research firm uses website indexing, machine learning and proprietary software to forecast online sales of individual products on Amazon and found that sales of consumables in the health and personal care market as well as the baby and grocery categories saw double digit growth for the first quarter of 2017. That compares with the overall consumables industry that saw declines of between 1 percent and 10 percent during the same time period. The report noted that last year Amazon earned $1.3 billion or 27.5 percent of the total sales in that retail segment.  The report found that in the health and personal care category hair care in the U.S. saw the most growth for Amazon, while in the U.K. it was household consumables sales that were the fastest growing for Amazon.

In the baby products category, online shopping on Amazon controlled 43 percent of the total market: in the first quarter sales of diapers in the U.S. increased 30 percent, while baby food saw a 15 percent uptick and sales of baby formula increased 80 percent. As for groceries, the report showed there was 30 percent growth in the U.S., U.K. and Germany for Amazon, driven by increased adoption of Amazon Prime during the first quarter of this year. “The popularity of perishables is growing rapidly, not only because consumers are becoming more comfortable with buying their groceries online, but also because Amazon is improving its delivery times and offering more fulfillment options,” explained Spencer Millerberg, One Click Retail CEO, according to the report. “With more shoppers buying exclusive access to Amazon Pantry, the rate of growth for most consumables is much higher in Pantry than in the general marketplace, with top categories multiplying revenue by as much as five times.”