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Amazon Boosts Holiday Initiatives With Unique Handmade Items

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Amazon (AMZN - Free Report) is riding on its vast product portfolio comprising of necessary to luxury items ranging from low to high prices.

The company is currently enhancing its product portfolio with gift items, especially unique handmade items, for a stellar performance in the upcoming holiday season.

This is in sync with the company’s strategy of ensuring all kinds of product for any season and occasion on its e-commerce platform for customers.

Further, this will promote Amazon Handmade which is a program providing an online platform to local artisans to showcase their works.

Notably, this will help the company in sustaining its dominant position in the e-commerce space.

Social Benefits to Aid Growth

We believe this move of the company adds to the social benefits as this not only expands its own product offerings but also gives a wider exposure to local artisans via its platform. Amazon enables the artisans to expand customer reach and bolster their sales with its handmade initiatives.

The company offers handmade items in 15 categories from small and local artisans across the United States such as Turtle’s Soup, Relaxcation, LucyLews, Renee Redesigns and Kaizen Wood Works to name a few.

The latest plan to focus more on offering hand-crafted products online is likely to strengthen its customer base and boost sales during the holiday season.

Notably, this along with the company’s aggressive retail strategy, expanding seller base and distribution strength will continue to benefit it in gaining traction in the retail space.

Coming to the price performance, shares of Amazon have returned 46.8% on a year-to-date basis, outperforming the industry’s rally of 3.3%.



Holiday Strategy to Boost Competition

Amazon’s deepening focus on the holiday season will continue to aid its competitive position in against some major retailers like Walmart (WMT - Free Report) , Target (TGT - Free Report) , Kohl’s (KSS - Free Report) , Five Below, J.C. Penney, Party City to name a few, which are also taking initiatives to boost their sales during the holiday season.

All of these retailers have taken toy initiatives as toys are great way to generate revenues. Reportedly, toy sales totaled $20.7 billion last year and $7.9 billion during the first half of 2018 in the United States.

Walmart is planning to expand its offline and online toy portfolio by 30% and 40%, respectively. Party City is on its way to establish 50 Toy City stores by this holiday season.

Further, Target, Kohl’s and J.C. Penney are also expanding their toy assortment to gain momentum during the holiday season.

However, Amazon’s strong steps for this season will only make things tougher for these core retailers which are already facing stiff competition from the company’s robust e-commerce platform.

Apart from the Amazon Handmade initiative, the company has also adopted toy strategy. It is going good old-school with its plan of publishing toy catalogs for holiday season.

Notably, these catalogs will give a clear idea to the people regarding the options of toys and games available on its e-commerce platform. The customers will also get the product description from these catalogs.

Consequently, all these strong endeavors along with an expanding product portfolio of the company will aid its momentum during the holiday season.

Currently, Amazon carries a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold). You can see the complete list of today’s Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.

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