Where's Everyone Shopping? The Most Popular Shopping Apps this Holiday Season

Ariel Ariel
11/25/22

This is a single insight from This Week in Apps - It's All a Streaming Game. Check out the full article for more insights.


The holiday shopping season kickstarted very early this year. What used to start with Black Friday at the end of November started about a month early with Amazon's second Prime Day. Although Prime Day wasn't a big hit, many other apps have started their deals season around that time and some are pushing hard with ads.

I rounded up the numbers and ranked the most downloaded shopping apps in the US since the beginning of November*, and the top result is not Amazon.

Temu, a new entrant into the shopping race I looked at in Issue #139, was the most downloaded shopping app in the US in November*. Our App Intelligence shows Temu was downloaded by 6 million users, a hefty haul for an app that launched in September. Its unique value is super low prices on lots of things, but its real secret for growth is... Apple Search Ads, which Temu relies on heavily.

Amazon was not the second most downloaded shopping app in the US in November! That spot went to rival Walmart, which pushed its Black Friday campaign very hard and clearly did it right. It added 3 million users in the US in November.

Amazon came in 3rd, adding 2 million downloads (after rounding) from the US in November*, according to our estimates. The App Store was responsible for most of those downloads, as to be expected.

SHEIN and Bath & Body Works round out the top 5. Both have seen pretty stable downloads and both saw roughly the same number of downloads even though one has been around for a while and the other is fairly new.

Together, the top 10 most downloaded shopping apps made their way into 21 million devices since the beginning of November* in the US. Much like last year, the shopping season started fairly early, and we can see that by the number of downloads.

Several years ago I spoke with a founder who was passionately convinced that e-commerce will stay on the web and never move in-app. 21 million new downloads in a month tell a different story.

* November, in this article, refers to Nov. 1st to Nov. 22nd.

App Intelligence for Everyone!

The insights in this report come right out of our App Intelligence platform, which offers access to download and revenue estimates, installed SDKs, and more! Learn more about the tools or schedule a demo with our team to get started.

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All figures included in this report are estimated. Unless specified otherwise, estimated revenue is always net, meaning it's the amount the developer earned after Apple and Google took their fee.

Tagged: #shopping

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