• by Richard Whitman , Columnist, October 23, 2018

GroupM’s Catalyst, a search and social specialist shop, is out with new research that shows an eye-popping 96% of consumers have visited Amazon.com within the last year.

Maybe that shouldn’t come as a big surprise. I mean how many people do you know who haven’t gone to Amazon for something in the last year?

But the company isn’t as monolithic as you might think.

The research (done in conjunction with ClickZ) also reveals that 85% of browsing and purchasing activity occurs with non-Amazon retailers. And surprisingly, only 25% of U.S. brands say they have an advertising strategy for retailers beyond Amazon.

Brands are failing to grasp the full ecommerce opportunity, per the research, which has been compiled into a report called “The Era Of Commerce: Capitalizing On The New Customer Journey.”  

That’s especially true when you consider that just 28% of brands have a defined Amazon strategy. Another 38% are “working on it.”

Consumer product discovery is split evenly across retailers and search engines, per the research.  When consumers know what they are looking for, 50% of ecommerce journeys start with a retailer and 50% with a search engine.

Google is the most popular starting point overall (46%), followed by Amazon, with a surprisingly low 20% belying the perception that the firm is about to take over the world.  

While brands may generally be in-housing more of their ad agency work of late, that doesn’t appear to be the case with Amazon-related advertising. Just the opposite is occurring, per the report. It found that 43% of brands now outsource their Amazon advertising campaigns, compared to just 26% last year. The trend is similar with non-Amazon retailers.

“It is clear that consumers are charting their own paths to purchase and taking research into their own hands,” the report concludes.

Capitalizing on the ecommerce opportunity requires an integrated strategy for brands, which the report finds lacking. Getting it done will “require much closer collaboration between internal departments and agency partners.”  

I wouldn’t expect agency research to come to any other conclusion. And it might just be true.

There’s much more detail in the report, which can be downloaded here in exchange for some personal info.