July 30, 2018
With the June acquisition of PillPack and quieter forays into beauty, Amazon has demonstrated its intent to move into the online pharmacy business as well as the space dominated by Sephora and Ulta Beauty. 

We estimate Amazon’s US sales of health, personal care and beauty products will total $16.00 billion this year, a 37.9% increase over 2017, making it the third fastest growing category after food and beverage and apparel and accessories. While that’s only 6.2% of Amazon’s total retail ecommerce sales, it represents 44.3% of total retail ecommerce sales of health, personal care and beauty products in the US. 

One Click Retail estimated that Q2 2018 sales of health and personal care items on Amazon totaled $1.9 billion, increasing 23% year over year. Sales for beauty products reached $950 million, up 26%. Nutrition and wellness and mass skincare were the top-selling product subcategories within health and personal care and beauty. The biggest gains were in luxury beauty, though. The category that was slow to take to Amazon grew 57%, accounting for $250 million in sales. 

"The eMarketer Ecommerce Insights Survey," conducted in July 2018 by Bizrate Insights, found that medicine, vitamins, minerals or supplements was the second most digitally purchased product category by US internet users in the past 30 days. It also had the distinction of being the only category where internet users ages 60 and older had higher levels of purchasing than all other age groups (31.7%). Personal care and hygiene (27.4%) and cosmetics and fragrances (24.8%) were the next most popular digital categories, with a considerable proportion of respondents ages 18 to 29 buying them online (48.8% and 42.5%, respectively).

Sourced through Scoop.it from: retail.emarketer.com