What Amazon shoppers want to buy most this year
If you spend any time online, you've already read about the dozens of electronics, gadgets and even clothes that are the most discounted, most blogged about and most hotly anticipated
But what are millennial shoppers actually hoping to buy?
A shopping tech startup has one answer: the Instant Pot.
That's the surprising No. 1 item on a list of Amazon (AMZN) items most saved by users of Honey, a popular browser extension that searches for discounts. Honey has 6 million active users, said Ryan Hudson, one of Honey's founders, with two-thirds of them being millennials.
Honey works by scouring the web for discount codes and then springs into action when a shopper is about to check out, trying sometimes dozens of coupon codes from a constantly updating database. In June, it started rolling out a wish-list feature called Droplist, which lets shoppers save items and get an alert if the price drops substantially.
The Instant Pot beat items like Amazon's Echo dot and other electronic gadgets to become the most-saved item. Here are the top 5 items saved, according to Honey:
1. Instant Pot Multi-Use Programmable Pressure Cooker
2. Fire TV Stick (with Alexa Voice Remote)
3. Echo Dot (2nd Generation) - Black
4. Aztec Secret Indian Healing Clay (1 lb)
5. Nintendo Switch - Neon Blue and Red
Honey isn't the only price-tracking site -- places like CamelCamelCamel also offer price-history information on Amazon items. However, Honey's reach allows it some unique insights. "Over $300 million worth of products have been added to people's droplists," said Ryan Hudson, one of Honey's founders. "To date, it has blown away our expectations."
That's a total of six million items, a Honey spokeswoman later clarified; the average list has nine items on it.
The app's popularity speaks to Americans' enduring appetite for discounts. As many as 80 percent are regular coupon-clippers, and discounts are the primary reason shoppers buy something from a marketing email. Stores that do away with discounting do so at their peril, as JCPenney (JCP) discovered five years ago.
"For the consumer, it's psychological. They want to at least perceive that they are getting a good value," said Douglas Clark, spokeperson for eMarketer, via email.
"One of the things that's adding to confusion and uncertainty around consumer shopping is that prices change so frequently," said Honey's Hudson. "We're trying to simplify that with data, and help consumers make informed choices, and make the stores they're shopping on better places to shop."
So what is it about the Instant Pot?
The multi-use cooker has developed a "cult following" since its 2010 launch, amassing rave reviews even on the most skeptical food and consumer review sites. Americans have bought 2.6 million Instant Pots in the last year alone.
It's "the all-in-one pot that does nearly everything," Jane Pauley said on CBS Sunday Morning. It's a pressure cooker, rice cooker, slow cooker and other things. "One gadget that does the work of seven," said The Kitchn. And Serious Eats called it "fantastic value." At a base price of $79 (high-tech models for up to $180), it's cheaper than many one-function pressure cookers or slow cookers, and it's easy to use.
But that doesn't mean shoppers don't want it to be even cheaper.