Amazon is the latest retailer to face a consumer boycott

The stat: Roughly 1 in 10 Amazon shoppers (9%) intends to participate in a week-long boycott of the retailer, according to a Numerator survey.

Zoom out: That’s not an insignificant number, considering that 69.8% of the US population are Prime users. But the boycott’s effectiveness is likely to be hampered by limited awareness: Just 27% of respondents knew that the spending “blackout” was taking place.

Still, the impact could extend beyond its ecommerce business: 48% of participants plan to avoid shopping at Whole Foods, while 45% will avoid Prime Video content and 13% plan to cancel their Prime memberships.

Yes, but: At the same time, there are limits to how far people are willing to go, particularly when it involves a retailer that offers nearly unmatched convenience and product selection.

• Consumers who shop at Amazon at least once a week were less likely to participate in the boycott than less frequent shoppers, suggesting that the retailer’s efforts to make its offerings stickier through Prime and faster deliveries is effective insulation from politics-driven shifts in spending.
• One-fifth of participants planned to shift their Amazon spending to before or after the boycott, again emphasizing how difficult it is for many to cut ties with the retailer.

So far, boycott efforts have had a limited effect on Amazon’s sales, although the data is noisy and could reflect factors such as unseasonable weather patterns and economic uncertainty.

• Momentum Commerce data found that the retailer’s sales were actually 1% higher on February 28 compared with the average over the previous eight Fridays.
• But Similarweb noted a 4.6% decrease in web traffic on that day compared with the previous week.

Our take: While consumers’ actions and survey responses don’t always match up, Target’s struggles and Costco’s surge show that people increasingly see spending as a form of activism, and are willing to vote with their wallets.

However, boycott efforts are likely to be more effective at retailers like Target, which largely deal in discretionary goods, than at companies like Amazon that have done a better job of making themselves indispensable to shoppers.