Articles

Shopify’s most significant opportunity is a marketplace. It already helps with data, payments, fulfillment, capital, and store management. It helps with everything except for one thing - finding customers. As customer acquisition costs rise, Shopify’s challenge is to help here too.

Recommendations in product pages on Amazon are being replaced with sponsored placements. As Amazon improves its advertising technology and overall ad spend increases, brands are placing their products where customers previously looked for suggested products.

Years after announcing fast shipping options on eBay, less than 1% of the over 800 million listings for sale on the platform offer three-day shipping. The reason so few items on eBay offer fast shipping is because there is no incentive for sellers. On eBay, offering fast shipping doesn't increase sales.

More than 15,000 sellers based in the U.S. surpassed $1 million in sales on Amazon in 2019, the company confirmed in a statement on Tuesday. The figure includes businesses selling on Amazon.com in the U.S., as well as those selling on the international marketplaces. American sellers make up nearly half of $1 million or more sellers worldwide.

In 2019, sellers on the Amazon marketplace sold $200 billion worth of products, and as a retailer, Amazon's sales were $135 billion. For a total Amazon gross merchandise volume of $335 billion, Marketplace Pulse estimates based on Amazon disclosures.

Since launching in India in 2013, the Amazon marketplace there has grown to more than 550,000 sellers. It has doubled in size during the last two years, becoming Amazon’s fastest-growing marketplace except for the U.S. On a recent trip to India, Jeff Bezos, CEO at Amazon, talked about the company’s plans to bring more than 10 million sellers online by 2025.

In 2019, Amazon's online sales accounted for only 50% of the company's total revenue. For the first time, Amazon generated as much revenue from AWS cloud hosting, Prime memberships, the third-party marketplace, and advertising, as it did from selling products online.

Sales on eBay in the US declined 9% in the fourth quarter, and the number of sold items globally shrunk 4%. In the US, eBay’s market share of online shopping is second only to Amazon, but while the rest of the market is growing, eBay is shrinking.

The number of top Amazon.com sellers based in China has surpassed US sellers. 49% of the top Amazon.com sellers are based in China, and only 47% are US-based. In a year, China-based sellers have grown their share of top Amazon.com sellers from 38% to 49%.

Last year Amazon made it easier for shoppers to leave a star rating by no longer requiring a written review. As a result, popular products on the shopping site are now getting hundreds of ratings a day, while also increasing their overall star rating.