This week we are looking at the category “Baumarkt” (DIY) on Amazon DE.
It covers nearly everything you can buy at a typical DIY/Hardware store – from building supplies through to security technology to protect your home – excluding garden products.

This might be the main reason why sales in the DIY category on Amazon are more stable than one would expect.

DIY on Amazon is one of the categories that strongly benefitted from the pandemic in 2020.
According to the BHB (Handelsverband Heimwerken, Bauen und Garten e.V.) last year DIY sales increased by about 14% yoy in Germany.

DIY on Amazon DE shows a yoy sales growth of more than 50% in 2020.
A clear sign that consumers shifted their buying behavior from offline to online during the pandemic.
This can also be confirmed by looking at the sales development within the year, where we see a strong increase of sales starting with the first lockdown.

2021 shows a different sales development.
Within the year, the sales development shows a declining trend, i.e. sales in the weeks from February through to August are lower than in January 2021.
But the development simply reflects that the year started very strong with more than 100% sales increase compared to January 2020. Ytd sales increase is at about 45% yoy.
Excluding Prime Day – which this year took place in June – yoy sales growth is below 10% in the category DIY.

Assuming that we will not have a strict lockdown again in Germany this year, we expect the 2nd HY 2021

We see a similar development in many other categories: Lower infection numbers accompanied by the relaxation of COVID-19 regulations result in reduced online sales.
This is most likely driven by a combination of different factors:

▶ consumers partially shift their buying behavior from online to offline shopping
▶ consumers travel during vacation time rather than staying at home
▶ work is “back to normal”, i.e. more employees are back to the office rather than working from home, leading to less free time

*metoda original research

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