Executive Summary 2
Research sample 3
Headline fndings 4
Research Commentary 6
Pricing and the perception of value 6
Shopping with intent 13
Shopping for inspiration 19
Concluding Remarks 24
Appendix 26
Contributors 26
About Inviqa 27
About Magento Commerce 27
About Vision One 27
Ecommerce services at Inviqa 27
Contents
1Executive Summary
Forecast to represent 35% of spending
by 2030, millennials will become the
mainstream consumer within a decade.
They’re pushing the boundaries of
customer experience and they’re spending
more on Amazon, with 79% of millennials
having made a purchase on the platform
in the past month compared with 62% of
Gen Z, the demographic after millennials.
In the shadow of Amazon’s growing
dominance, online retailers across multiple
industries are on the defence in a shrinking
retail space. And as they strive to give
consumers compelling reasons to shop from
them directly, identifying and understanding
the needs and behaviours of the millennial
demographic will be critical to their survival.
Amazon is the default ecommerce destination
for this demographic, with 59% of 16-36
year-olds heading to Amazon before any
other ecommerce website, according to our
research. And so Amazon’s main propositions
– convenience, value, and product
inventory – clearly speak to millennials.
Amazon Prime, offering fast, ‘free’ shipping
and one-click purchasing, forms the
backbone of Amazon’s cost proposition
and has attracted more than 100 million
members globally who spend nearly 50%
more on the platform than non-members.
The retail giant’s easy returns process and
vast inventory have also contributed to
its market dominance. From the outset
Amazon positioned itself as the ‘Everything
Store’ and 23% of millennials say the
main reason they’d shop with Amazon
rather than another site is because of
its range of products and categories.
This breadth of offering, which continues
to widen, is hugely daunting for retailers,
and Amazon has been ruthless in using data
from its customers, sellers, and competitor
brands to test consumer appetite for
particular products and price points. It’s
used this insight to roll-out more than
70 private-label brands, earning itself a
reputation for ‘using the sales data of its
own sellers to drive them out of business’.
Amazon is good at being an ecommerce
company, but even better at ‘making new
ecommerce companies that sell new things’,
using its scale and data to move overnight
and disrupt a growing number of industries.
In the words of customer experience expert
Shep Hyken, Amazon has become ‘the
master of being anticipatory’, using data from
millions of Amazon shoppers (purchasing from
a product inventory of millions) to spot trends
and ‘make predictions with uncanny success’.
But the retail Goliath is a black box when it
comes to sharing data with retailers, and so
customer insight – Amazon’s greatest asset
– is the very thing retailers must be prepared
to sacrifce when selling on the platform.
In this report, based on a nationally-
representative sample of 1,000 UK millennials,
we aim to help retailers understand how they
can adapt ecommerce experiences to better
meet the needs of millennial shoppers, and
to survive and thrive in the Amazon era.
33
Research sample
This report analyses the online shopping
preferences and behaviours of 1,000 UK
millennials (defned as UK citizens born
1982–2001). The nationally representative
sample consists of consumers aged 16-36
years old who have made at least one online
purchase within the past three months (as of
May 2018). The multiple-choice survey was
conducted using an online questionnaire
produced by consumer research company
Vision One. The qualifed sample was
split evenly by gender and by ‘older’ and
‘younger’ millennials (defned as 26-36-year-
olds and 16-25-year-olds respectively).
1,000 UK
millennials。