Articles

Amazon's retail platform is built on legacy principles of the wholesale past. As it slowly readjusts to offer more data and better tools for brands, brands are innovating outside of Amazon, leaving it, together with the rest of retailers, watching from the sidelines.

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.

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.

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.

Amazon launched in the United Arab Emirates on Tuesday, replacing Souq.com - the largest e-commerce platform in the Arab world it acquired for $580 million in 2017 - with Amazon.ae. According to Marketplace Pulse research, Amazon UAE launched with more than 10,000 sellers.

In the latest quarter, Amazon online sales accounted for less than 50% of the company's total revenue. For the first time since the company was founded in 1994, Amazon generated more revenue from AWS cloud hosting, Prime memberships, the third-party marketplace, and advertising, than it did from selling products online.

Amazon waited for the competition to catch up and is now playing both defense and offense by flipping the switch to enable free one-day shipping.

eBay reported $21.5 billion in GMV in Q1, down -4% year-over-year from $22.5 billion on an as-reported basis and -1% on a foreign exchange (FX) neutral basis. Further, for the last four quarters, sold-item growth was 0% – zero percent.

The anecdote answer to the question “How do you feel about the data you’re getting from Amazon?” is “What data?” Brands and merchants often critique Amazon for the lack of data available. However, the limited data it does provide is enough to reverse engineer the supply and demand matrix.

After a decade of trying Amazon is giving up on the one market it failed to grow. However, while Amazon struggled to grow, not only has China e-commerce exploded in growth, so has the number of successful businesses from China selling through Amazon.