Assists from Jordan, Kobe and LeBron keep Nike.com ahead of Amazon in athletic shoes

Basketball shoes have been big news for the few weeks with stories ranging from Nike’s chicken and waffle themed basketball shoes to Reebok’s release of Aliens inspired sneakers. But when it comes to fastest-moving athletic shoes online, Slice Intelligence found that there is one big player that towers above all others shoe sales: Nike.

Nearly 64 percent of athletic shoe buyers purchase kicks with the Swoosh logo. As a merchant, Nike.com is also the top player with 32 percent of online athletic shoes being purchased directly from their site, outpacing both Amazon and Zappos who hold the second, and third place positions.

Despite the fact that it has been 13 years since Michael Jordan played in the NBA, Nike’s Jordan shoes are still the most popular player branded sneakers purchased online.  Over the past year, nearly two-thirds of basketball shoe sales sported the Jumpman logo. With 14 percent of online sales, the Nike Kobe comes in second, and sales of the Kobe line jumped up substantially since the shooting guard announced his retirement plans in late November. Rising in the ranks is the Curry basketball shoe. Under Armour’s first major NBA endorsed player shoe line is still below Nike’s lineup, but, like Steph himself, is getting increasingly popular. The shoe has been 170 percent more popular during the past six months compared to the previous half-year period.

For Nike’s NBA player-endorsed basketball shoes, the New York City metropolitan area is the number-one region for Jordan and LeBron shoes, even though they never played for the Knicks or Nets. Under Armour’s Warrior pivots from this trend and finds home court advantage in California, as does LA's Kobe.

With a panel of over 4 million online shoppers, Slice Intelligence gives the most detailed, and accurate digital commerce data available, and is reported daily.

Slice Intelligence is the only service to measure digital commerce directly from the consumer, across all retailers, at the item level, and over time. Our retailer-independent methodology precisely measures commerce as it happens. By extracting detailed information from hundreds of millions of aggregated and anonymized e-receipts, Slice can map the entire Purchase Graph, connecting each and every consumer to all their purchases.

Slice gets its data from e-receipts – not a browser, app or software installed by the end-user – so its measurement reflects comprehensive shopping behavior across multiple devices, over time which are key in an increasingly omnichannel retail world.