Amazon has a secret weapon that is crushing the competition

Seth Archer

Amazon is taking over the world, and it has one secret weapon making its conquest possible.

The online retailer blows its competition out of the water when it comes to customer loyalty. In a recent survey from RBC Capital Markets, 93% of the 2,200 Americans surveyed said they use Amazon more than any other online retailer over the past year. That's quite the market penetration.

Amazon isn't just good, it's getting better. In 2015, the gap between Amazon and the next closest retailer, eBay, was 52 percentage points. In 2017, the gap is 59 points.

Among the huge swath of Americans that use Amazon, nearly half of them use the service at least two to three times a month. They spend a lot of money too. 33% of those surveyed by RBC said they spend more than $800 annually.

Take a second to let that sink in. About the same number of people surveyed that have used eBay in the past year have spent more than $800 at Amazon.

These would be impressive numbers for any company, but don't think that success is slowing Amazon down at all. More than half of those surveyed, 55%, have signed up for Amazon Prime. This means Amazon brings in about $6.4 billion a year in Prime subscriptions alone, according to RBC.

Those Prime subscribers are really loyal customers. Nearly half of those subscribers are spending more than $800 a year at Amazon and 74% of them are shopping with Amazon at least twice a month.

America must be envious of all their neighbors Amazon branded boxes showing up each month because more and more people are signing up for Prime. Six percent of America signed up for Prime last year.

This kind of customer loyalty means bad things for competitors. When Amazon entered the grocery store business by buying Whole Foods, grocery stocks lost $24 billion of value in a week as their stocks tanked.

The Amazon effect is so strong that fund managers are starting to look for stocks the company can't conquer.

All of these numbers come from RBC's survey, which only hit 2,200 Americans, so the results aren't perfect but they certainly are impressive.

Shares of Amazon currently trade at $975.35 and is up 29.45% this year.

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