Fulfillment is Amazon's Single Point of Failure
Recent months have highlighted the vulnerability that stems from Amazon’s fulfillment operations: Amazon warehouses and ships practically everything sold on Amazon. The same FBA moat that allows the company to provide a consistent shopping experience despite millions of sellers behind the scenes is a single point of failure. As it tries to protect that single point of failure, it needs increasingly strict quantity restrictions, high fees, and complex rules for sellers using FBA.
Amazon Lost Web Traffic Market Share
Amazon lost some market share, as measured by web traffic, to the next ten biggest online retail rivals: down from 52% in January to 47% in June. Yet, as the pandemic brought accelerated e-commerce adoption, top players remained the same.
Amazon Marketplace Is No Longer Anonymous
Amazon will begin displaying the business name and address of sellers in the U.S. marketplace starting September 1st, putting the U.S. marketplace in line with the European, Japan, and Mexico marketplaces, where this information was always available because of local laws.
Longtime Amazon Sellers Drive Most Sales
The majority of sales volume on the Amazon marketplace comes from sellers that have been on it for years. That signals the controlled churn and high longevity of those businesses. At the same time, new sellers bring incremental growth.
Amazon’s Shrinking Reliance on Top Sellers
As the overall Amazon marketplace GMV expands, top sellers represent a shrinking percent. More of the sales come from a broader set of sellers than the top sellers outpacing the rest. The data indicates that it is getting harder for large sellers to continue growing because it is getting easier for new sellers to start selling.
Shopify Stores on Walmart Marketplace
More brands joined the Walmart marketplace last week than ever before, setting a record for new sellers added in a week. The partnership with Shopify, announced on June 15th, was mostly why more than 1,100 new sellers joined the marketplace. That’s three times more than the average week this year so far.
Shopify’s Pivot to an Integrator
Despite Shopify's new-found narrative of being an integrator, it's a poor one. And as a business, it assumes other channels will not succeed, because that would render Shopify obsolete.
Amazon Launches in Saudi Arabia
Amazon launched in Saudi Arabia on Wednesday, June 17th, replacing Souq.com - the largest e-commerce platform in the Arab world it acquired for $580 million in 2017 - with Amazon.sa. Saudi Arabia is Amazon’s 17th global marketplace. A year ago, the company launched in the United Arab Emirates, replacing Souq there too.
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