How many units of the same product does a buyer take per order? 12 seller accounts over six months
Multipacks, quantity discounts, "buy two" offers: they all assume that a buyer would take more than one unit of the same product in one order. We looked at six months of 12 seller accounts to see how often that actually happens.
Rarely. There were 107 units for every 100 order items, and the second and third units came from a handful of products. Price did not explain it. The kind of product did.
How we measured
The data comes from Amazon's order report, May 1 to October 31, 2026, for 12 seller accounts in 8 marketplaces (Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Belgium, Ireland, the UK and the US). Cancelled orders are not in the report.
The report gives, per product and per day, how many orders contained the product and how many units of it sold. So we count order items: one product in one order. If someone bought two different products in one order, that is two order items. The units per order item ratio therefore measures how many units of the same product the buyer took. It does not measure how many different products went into the basket.
We left out the 25 rows (26 order items, 60 units) that had no revenue, because we do not know what they were (one of them was a single 25-unit order item). The ratio is an average: it shows how many extra units came, not from how many orders.
Seven extra units per hundred order items
| Value | |
|---|---|
| Order items | 4,599 |
| Units sold | 4,932 |
| Units per order item | 1.072 |
| Second or further units | 333 (6.8% of units) |
The months differ little: between 1.059 and 1.078 from May to September, 1.107 in October.
The 333 extra units are not spread evenly. Of 189 product-marketplace pairs (one product in one marketplace), 67 had any extra units at all, and the 10 pairs with the most extra units brought 168 of the 333. On one account, 13 order items carried 45 units, which alone is 32 extra units.
Of the 56 product-marketplace pairs with at least 20 order items, 14 had not a single extra unit, and only 4 went above 1.20.
Price does not explain it
In the euro marketplaces, by what the product sold for on average per unit in that marketplace (six months of revenue divided by units sold):
| Unit price | Order items | Units per order item |
|---|---|---|
| Under 15 euros | 1,300 | 1.069 |
| 15-20 euros | 1,250 | 1.074 |
| 20-30 euros | 519 | 1.131 |
| 30-50 euros | 292 | 1.055 |
| 50 euros and over | 1,024 | 1.058 |
Each band boundary belongs to the upper band: a unit price of exactly 20 euros is in the 20-30 euro band.
Between products under 15 euros and products at 50 euros or more, the difference is one unit per 100 order items (1.069 against 1.058). Of the 68 extra units in the 20-30 euro band, 21 came from 3 order items of a single product.
The kind of product matters
Most extra units came where the buyer buys for a job or to consume, and the quantity depends on the job:
- Concrete fibre (Beton Booster). The 0.9 kg pack brought 68 units in 46 order items in France (1.48), and 53 units in 46 order items in Germany (1.15). The 9 kg pack was also bought in multiples in France: 40 units in 28 order items. The 2.7 kg pack in Germany never sold more than one unit per order item, in 20 order items.
- Tea (Going Forward). The 50 g pack of the raspberry leaf and marshmallow tea brought 136 units in 109 order items (1.25). The 30 g pack of the same tea brought exactly 123 units in 123 order items.
Where people buy the product once, there was almost never a second unit:
- Board game (Bohema Games): 360 order items, 362 units.
- Outdoor cat house (Molly Cat): 195 order items, 197 units.
What this data does not tell you
It does not tell you what a quantity discount or a multipack would do. We measured how buyers bought with the current offers, and we did not check which products ran a quantity discount in the period. The price table covers only the euro marketplaces: the UK (116 order items) and the US (98 order items) have too little data for it.
What to do with it
- Check your own ratio. Seller Central, Reports, Business Reports, the Detail Page Sales and Traffic by Child Item view: Units Ordered divided by Total Order Items. If a product shows exactly 1, nobody has bought two of it so far.
- Plan multipacks where buyers already take more. For us that was the concrete fibre and the larger tea pack. A product people buy once (a board game, a cat house) gives you nothing to build on.
- Do not start from the price. In our data, products under 15 euros sold only one more unit per 100 order items than products at 50 euros or more.
- Look at the same product per marketplace. The same concrete fibre was 1.48 in France and 1.15 in Germany.
- If you are choosing a pack size, measure both. With the tea, buyers took more units of the larger pack at once, not of the smaller one.