For online retailers that also sell on marketplaces, sales via Amazon during the holiday season can sometimes feel like a stocking full of coal instead of candy. While online retailers beef up their marketing and tweak their sites, lurking behind just about every retailer’s strategy is Amazon.

Here’s why:

• Only 38.8% of consumers start their product searches on Google, according to a December 2016 Internet Retailer survey of 515 U.S. adult online shoppers, while over half, 52.5%, start—and often end—their searches on Amazon.
• More than a third (33.8%) of visits to retail websites during November and December 2016 were to Amazon.com, according to Hitwise, a division of Connexity Inc., and a provider of e-commerce marketing automation technology.
• Amazon accounted for 38% of U.S. e-retail sales during the 2016 holiday season, according to Slice Intelligence, a research firm that tracks email receipts of more than 4.4 million online shoppers.

As Amazon’s share of the e-commerce market grows, particularly during the holiday season, many retailers are left to figure out how to compete. That often leads…

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