At least 700,000 brands on Amazon have a trademark. An increase of 40% from the prior year. Even seemingly randomly generated names like LORELEI, RORSOU, MAJCF, or VBIGER are trademarked brands. | Continue reading
2021 was the year of broken supply chains, Amazon aggregators, more advertising, Shopify's almost-marketplace, and one unanswered question - did the pandemic boost e-commerce after all? For now, the world of marketplaces revolves around Amazon - it has doubled in size in two year … | Continue reading
Amazon has suspended hundreds of top Chinese sellers over the past two months. The company seems to be just now enforcing its rules for blatant policy violations like manipulating customer reviews. Tactics that some of those sellers have used for years. | Continue reading
Amazon has suspended over a dozen Chinese sellers for participating in fake review schemes. The list includes Mpow and Aukey, two of the biggest electronics Amazon-native brands out of China. The total sales by the suspended sellers eclipses $1 billion. | Continue reading
For most consumers, Amazon has been back to normal for a while. However, behind the scenes, for the sellers and brands that sell on Amazon, Amazon’s fulfillment operations have remained disrupted. | Continue reading
Amazon is spending on marketing to increase the number of shoppers, which attracts brands to buy more advertising, recouping most of Amazon’s marketing expenses. The company spent $4.8 billion on marketing-related expenses in the first quarter of 2020 but captured $3.9 in revenue … | Continue reading
In 2019, sellers on the Amazon marketplace sold $200 billion worth of products. Amazon marketplace is so large it would rank as the 50th largest economy in the world if it were its own country. Below New Zealand's economy, but bigger than Qatar's. The *Year in Review looks* at th … | Continue reading
The best selling winter coat this winter is by a Chinese brand Orolay. In March 2018, the New York magazine wrote an article calling it the Amazon Coat, after it became a small, but growing, trend on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. The coat went viral that winter and a year lat … | Continue reading
More than ten thousand sellers attended the 5th annual Amazon Global Store Cross-Border Summit held in Shanghai on December 11-12th. Twice as many participated in the live online broadcast because the even was sold out. The event didn’t present any breaking news, but keynote spea … | Continue reading
Amazon, not unlike other retailers, is making the shopping event starting on Thanksgiving calmer. Deals are no longer constrained to Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Instead, they are spread out over days leading up to it and continue once it is over. | Continue reading
In September, Amazon expanded product reviews by allowing shoppers to leave a star rating without a written review. For example, the Apple AirPods received, on average, 20 new reviews a day. Since the introduction of ratings, the rate of reviews didn't change, but consumers leave … | Continue reading
There are close to 3 million active sellers on Amazon marketplaces worldwide, an increase of 17.7% in a year. A seller is active if they have products listed for sale. Less than 10% of the active sellers were able to achieve $100,000 in yearly sales, and only 1% reached $1 millio … | Continue reading
US e-commerce grew 17.3% in the third quarter, the fastest growth since the fourth quarter of 2011 more than seven years ago. Retailers generated $145.7 billion in online sales in the third quarter compared to $124.2 billion a year ago. | Continue reading
This year, Walmart added 10 million products to the online catalog, but only half a million of that is sold directly by Walmart. The marketplace brought the rest of the assortment as it accelerated in growth by adding 10,000 new sellers since the start of the year. Today Walmart … | Continue reading
Nike, one of the most searched brands on Amazon, will stop selling its products directly on Amazon, ending a pilot program that began in 2017. To avoid losing the Nike assortment, Amazon has been recruiting third-party sellers with Nike products so that the merchandise is still a … | Continue reading
eBay search results now start with five sponsored product ads. The company has recently adjusted the mix of promoted and non-promoted listings at the top of search results, which previously rarely had ads. The default search page format has 48 listings plus an additional 13 spons … | Continue reading
Brands and retailers will spend $9.85 billion on advertising on Amazon in the US to boost their position in search results. Amazon advertising is growing beyond performance marketing in the form of sponsored products, though. Amazon is going after ad budgets under CMOs, looking f … | Continue reading
Etsy changed its search algorithm to prioritize free shipping above everything else, pushing some of the relevant results to functional invisibility. "Items [without free shipping] are not given first-page placement, even if our search algorithms might have previously ranked them … | Continue reading
Amazon’s search is increasingly featuring sponsored products, Amazon brands, as well as recommended products, instead of organic results. For many searches, there are only two organic results on the whole screen above the fold. Not until scrolling down past various recommended pr … | Continue reading
Amazon has expanded product reviews by allowing shoppers to leave a star rating without a written review. The company has been testing the change since September, and committed to it last week by changing the wording on the website to "ratings." The overall star rating now includ … | Continue reading
Amazon's sales rose 22% in the third quarter, the biggest gain in two years. Since also growing 22% in Q3 2017, Amazon's first-party sales - not the total GMV including the marketplace, but only sales where Amazon is the retailer - have only been growing 13.5% on average. | Continue reading
eBay GMV was down by $1 billion, and the sold items growth has turned negative for the first time in the company’s history. The company reported $20.4 billion in GMV in Q3, down -5% year-over-year from $21.4 billion. Sold items growth was -3%; it hasn’t grown since 2018 Q1. | Continue reading
Amazon has discontinued thirty of its clothing brands in recent months. Clothing brands account for more than half of Amazon’s hundreds of private label brands; however, they rarely succeed. Amazon Essentials, Goodthreads, Daily Ritual, and Lark & Ro brands have performed well, a … | Continue reading
Amazon has started to add local Whole Foods assortment with free two-hour delivery for Prime members to its main website and app. Previously, Prime members had to use a separate Prime Now app. Searches for groceries like bananas or yogurt now return Whole Foods items intermixed w … | Continue reading
3.3 million new third-party sellers have joined Amazon marketplaces worldwide since January 1st, 2017; over a million of which joined the Amazon.com marketplace in the US. Three million equals to 3,317 new sellers every day for the last one thousand days, or 138 every hour, or ev … | Continue reading
Amazon launched in Singapore on Monday, October 7th. Singapore is Amazon’s 16th global marketplace after launching in the United Arab Emirates in April and Turkey in September last year. The company has first launched in Singapore more than two years ago with its fast delivery se … | Continue reading
47% of the top Amazon.com sellers are based in the US, and 38% are based in China. Brooklyn, New York hosts the zip code with the most Amazon US-based sellers, and Shenzhen is home to a third of Chinese sellers on Amazon. | Continue reading
Revenue from Amazon private label brands pales in comparison to the negative attention they have attracted. Amazon's brands have only grown to a few billion dollars in sales a year - less than 1% of company's total sales - while drawing increasing critique from the industry and t … | Continue reading
Amazon, together with singer Lady Gaga, launched a beauty line Haus Laboratories. The first major beauty brand sold exclusively on Amazon. Pushed by the Amazon marketing efforts on Prime Day, the brand became the number one best-seller in the Makeup category by the end of the eve … | Continue reading
Amazon is testing a new "Our Brand" badge for its private label products. Sponsored products ads for Amazon-owned brands now have a label "Our Brand" instead of "Sponsored." Amazon has also increased the number of sponsored products ads at the start of search results from two to … | Continue reading
Last year Amazon launched two high-profile AmazonBasics products - a $59.99 Alexa-enabled microwave and a foam mattress starting at $129.99. However, while the microwave became the best-seller from day one, the mattress failed to do the same. Amazon's private label efforts is not … | Continue reading
Shenzhen hosts a third of third-party Chinese sellers on Amazon and is estimated to be the city with the largest number of Amazon sellers anywhere in the world. It is a major city in Guangdong province, one of the leading commercial and manufacturing regions in China, with the ec … | Continue reading
In February, Target launched a marketplace called Target+, or Target Plus. The invite-only marketplace started with 30 merchants, and six months later has grown to just 55 merchants and 115,000 products. However, the last few quarters have shown how well it has been able to integ … | Continue reading
In March, Amazon launched Belei, a skincare brand consisting of cleansing wipes, moisturizers, masks, and serums. Six months later, the brand has failed to impress consumers. Belei products are rated 3.8 out of 5 stars, and none had become best-sellers. | Continue reading
Amazon is testing a new "Top Brand" badge for products from established brands. If and how this badge gets rolled out could have a substantial impact on how shoppers decide which products to buy as well as how established brands defend against price-aggressive private label produ … | Continue reading
In an interview with an antitrust expert Sally Hubbard, we discussed what makes Amazon a monopoly, how that affects consumers, businesses relying on Amazon, and competitors, as well as what actions and regulations antitrust investigations might bring in the future. | Continue reading
The new Google Shopping homepage, now hosting 2,000 stores, attempts to unify the company's shopping efforts into one. Google has merged the marketplace-turned Google Express into Google Shopping, a service which used to focus on price comparison. | Continue reading
eBay introduced Managed Delivery, a fulfillment service not unlike Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA), enabling sellers to store, pack and ship their products through logistics partners managed by eBay. Replicating what drove sellers to use FBA is the hardest challenge eBay will have to … | Continue reading
On Prime Day 2019, the biggest winners were known brands and Amazon devices, as Amazon-owned private label brands took a back seat, according to Marketplace Pulse research. Over a million products were available with a Prime Day deal, but as competing retailers like Walmart and T … | Continue reading
The number of AmazonBasics best-sellers has grown by fifty percent in a year - from just over 700 in July 2018 to surpassing 1,000 this July. Amazon continues to launch new products, validate demand for them, and stop selling those which fail to attract customers. | Continue reading
Less than 24% of the top Amazon third-party sellers are large resellers, each representing hundreds of brands on Amazon. Their share of the top sellers has been decreasing by two percentage points a year - down from 26% in 2018, 29% in 2017, and 31% in 2016 - indicating the chall … | Continue reading
More than three-quarters of Amazon searches are unbranded, seeking for generic products rather than name brands. Search terms highlight how Amazon shoppers' behavior is shifted from a brand-driven world observed elsewhere to a needs-based decision process. | Continue reading
There are close to two million different brands on Amazon. Every second it gets bombarded with new brands, new (often) fake reviews, and new sellers. In all that noise, it tries to find products consumers would like. | Continue reading
Walmart one-day delivery is available for 130,000 products in four cities: Phoenix, Las Vegas, San Diego, and Los Angeles. Ten million products are available on Amazon one-day delivery, in a lot more cities than four. | Continue reading
In ten years since 2009, e-commerce share of retail spending in the U.S. has grown from 3.8% to 10.2%. Last quarter it for the first time surpassed 10%. | Continue reading
Google is working to reduce the number of clicks from discovery to purchase. To compete in the world of Amazon, platforms for discovery have to bring the shopping experience in-house. Otherwise, the consumer is one tap away from opening the Amazon app. | Continue reading
40% of the top sellers on Amazon are based in China, up from 26% two years ago, according to Marketplace Pulse research. For Chinese retailers and manufacturers, Amazon is the most efficient direct-to-consumer platform to reach the US and European shoppers. | Continue reading
In the headphones category on Amazon, 2,435 different products from 766 brands were one of the top 100 best-sellers in the last twelve months. That’s seven new products from two new brands every day replacing previous products in the top 100 list. | Continue reading