Pulling in over €2 billion in sales, housewares is one of Amazon’s bread-and-butter product groups in Europe, second only to consumer electronics. According to our data, total housewares sales for Amazon’s European sites grew by more than 20% year-over-year in 2017, with some markets such as France growing as much at 63% YoY.
Recognizing the market potential, Amazon turned its attention to housewares in 2017. Several high-profile investments – including the additional of “shop by room” functionality on Amazon’s Home and Kitchen sites and the building of several new warehouses to manage the handling of bulky items such as appliances – reveal the retailer’s commitment to this product group.
This commitment is paying dividends in Europe, where Amazon’s market share continues to grow at an accelerated rate. In 2017, the bulk of housewares sales came from established product categories such as coffee makers and water filtration, while growth was driven by the emerging category of Floorcare and innovative kitchen appliances such as air fryers, sous vide cookers, and the Instant Pot.
2017 Top Devices:
- Air Fryers
- Coffee Makers
- Vacuum Cleaners
2017 Top Brands:
- Dyson (Vacuum Cleaners)
- iRobot (Robotic Vacuums)
- De’Longhi (Coffee Makers)
What’s Big: Floorcare
Unlike in the US, consumers in Europe still love their traditional vacuums. In the US, Floorcare on Amazon had been dominated by the iRobot Roomba robotic vacuum in recent years. In Europe, however, brands like Dyson, Miele, Siemens and Numatic are outperforming their robotic competitor.
In both Germany and France, Floorcare ranked as both the largest housewares category by sales and the fastest growing category in 2017. Dyson produced the top 4 bestselling vacuums on Amazon.fr and 2 of the top 3 on Amazon.de, with both Miele and Siemens having top-ranking items in Germany. In the UK, where Floorcare has experienced a relatively flat rate of growth, the Numatic Henry Bagged Vacuum still ranked as the bestselling housewares item of the year.
However, the robotic vacuum trend is picking up steam (or dirt?) in Europe. iRobot has a Roomba ranking as the #6 Floorcare item in France. In Germany, where sales of Robotic Vacuums grew by 58% YoY in 2017, the subcategory is led by Chinese brand ECOVACS with the #3 Floorcare item, and could rank as the largest subcategory in Germany by the end of 2018 if the trend continues.
Until then, Dyson is the brand to beat.
What’s Growing: Air Fryers
In Europe, the biggest housewares trend of the year was the air fryer. A recent kitchen innovation, this device promises the impossible: healthy deep-fried food. It uses convection to achieve the same results as a deep fryer with only a fraction of the oil, leading to much healthier results.
Consumers want to have their cake and eat it too, and innovative appliance designers are making progress in this department. But unlike the #1 appliance in North America, the Instant Pot, air fryers are not dominated by a single high-performance brand. The leading items in the UK include air fryers from Tefal, Tower, Philips and Breville, all of which contributed to a growth rate of over 400% in the Deep Fryer subcategory.
What’s Stable: Coffee Makers
In Germany, Hot Beverage Makers ranked as the #2 housewares category (#3 in the UK) and was the fastest-growing category after Floorcare. For European Amazon shoppers, both the Kitchen and Grocery product groups have been dominated by coffee and coffee makers practically from the beginning, so it’s no surprise the category did so well in 2017.
However, there are some new trends apparent in this year’s data – the biggest one being the falling popularity of coffee capsule machines. In the UK, they earned only £10M in estimated sales, less than 20% of the category total, and were beaten by a De’Longhi Bean-to-Cup Espresso Maker as the bestselling coffee machine. In Germany, more than half of total category sales were in the Espresso Fully Automatic subcategory, and a De’Longhi product ranked as the #1 housewares item of 2017.
What’s Next: Instant Pot
Though the Instant Pot is available on Amazon in Europe and ranked as the #8 bestselling item of 2017 in the UK, the Canadian invention doesn’t have anywhere close to the enormous popularity it has experienced in the US. However, there is every reason to expect that this innovative, time-saving kitchen appliance is going to capture the imagination of the European public in the same way as it has in North America, where it’s been a bestseller for more than two years straight and is still growing in popularity.
Amazon shoppers tend to invest heavily in their homes, but they are highly interested in convenience and in economy of space. Today’s consumer tends to work long hours and live in small spaces, so the Instant Pot is perfectly suited to their needs. It saves time and effort by cooking food very rapidly and with a minimum of user input, and saves space by combining several small kitchen appliances into one.
At a growing rate, Amazon’s core audience—millennials—is shifting their buying habits as they invest in a stable and comfortable home life. True to their generation, however, they also love gadgets and innovative designs (air fryers – the fastest-growing subcategory in the UK). They work long hours and value efficient, low-input appliances (De’Longhi Magnifica Bean to Cup Espresso Maker – #1 in Germany and #2 in the UK). They care about their health and their home environment (Brita water filters – #3 and #6 in the UK).
Amazon has one of the world’s biggest collections of consumer behavioral data and can use that information to predict – with unmatched accuracy – how their customers’ buying habits will change as they enter new phases of life. So Amazon’s focus on housewares is no passing interest – it’s a strategic move designed to anticipate (and meet) the evolving needs of their core audience. As millennials become the major buying power in housewares, brands that focus on traditional brick-and-mortar as the primary retail channel are struggling to capture their dollars. Meanwhile, those that invest in Amazon are finding a massive new audience waiting for them.
“Clavis Insight and One Click Retail are combining to create the most comprehensive, accurate and actionable eCommerce insights and analytics solutions across online retailer sites worldwide. Attend our April 24th summit in NYC where Clavis Insight’s Chief Marketing Officer Danny Silverman and One Click Retail’s CEO Spencer Millerberg will be joined by industry expects to help you drive online channel sales and share.”
