Are Rich People Shopping Differently on Amazon?

Have you ever wondered what people with higher incomes spend their money on? Do they shop on the same platforms as the rest of us, or do their preferences tell a different story?

Thanks to a dataset from the Harvard Dataverse, we can dive into these questions. The dataset tracks longitudinal purchase data from 5,027 Amazon.com users in the U.S., spanning from 2018 to 2022.

Analyzing this data might just challenge your assumptions about how income shapes lifestyles and shopping habits.

This dataset categorizes individuals into different income brackets:

• Less than $25,000
• 25,000−49,999
• 50,000−74,999
• 75,000−99,999
• 100,000−149,999
• $150,000 or more

To compare their purchasing patterns, I took the following steps:

This uniform purchasing behavior across income levels suggests Amazon's successful market strategy in creating a universal shopping platform that appeals to all income brackets.

In addition, the data shows that people not only exhibit similar patterns in purchasing frequencies across different income levels but also share comparable total expenditure patterns across categories. This suggests that income level may not be the primary factor influencing people's purchasing behavior.

What's more interesting, with a range of age from 18 to 65, the data shows that people of different age groups have similar purchasing behavior patterns regarless of their age.

When categorizing the products, this article used the broad categories provided by Amazon. This might suggest that Amazon has crafted its target audience very effectively.