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Amazon launched in Sweden on Wednesday, October 28th. Few Swedish businesses - less than a hundred - joined the marketplace, but more than forty thousand worldwide sellers were present at the launch.

In November 2019, Nike stopped selling its goods wholesale to Amazon. It didn’t need Amazon at the time, and it needs them even less today - accelerated by the COVID-19 outbreak, direct e-commerce jumped to 30% of Nike’s sales, a mark it had previously expected to hit only in 2023.

The number of sellers on Amazon didn’t accelerate, despite the sales boom during the pandemic - the pie has gotten bigger, but the competition remained practically the same. This mismatch between supply and demand is a gap that existing sellers are filling.

Walmart launched a Pro Seller badge that highlights and rewards top-performing sellers. 350 out of the 60,000 sellers on Walmart have it. The badge appears to be an attempt to increase conversions for sellers with the badge, thus incentivizing others to achieve it too.

During Prime Day, the third-party marketplace dropped from the typical 60% of GMV to less than 35% as Amazon’s first-party sales’ share grew to nearly 70% from just 40%. Amazon featured heavily-discounted deals for devices like Echo and Fire TV, and thus they, unsurprisingly, gathered the most attention and sales.

This year’s Prime Day is going to be another record-breaker. However, in its sixth year, it stands out the most by how little Amazon is trying. As e-commerce expands to exclusives, personalization, social networks, live streams, and video media, Amazon sticks with doing none of it.

Hundreds of thousands of websites link to Amazon in hopes that their visitors purchase something on it, earning the website a percentage of the sale. Because it is the biggest e-commerce website, most publishers only link to Amazon, thus helping it grow and further increasing their reliance on it for income.

Businesses from California, Florida, Texas, New York, and New Jersey represented nearly half of the 75,000 new Amazon sellers in the U.S. over the past twelve months. There was no acceleration in the number of new sellers amid the pandemic, however.

In July, Google announced that it would take steps to bring more sellers and products onto its shopping marketplace by reducing commission fees to zero. Two months later, there is no noticeable acceleration in the number of sellers.

The Prime-enabled assortment has recovered to pre-COVID levels after Amazon’s decision in March to temporarily stop accepting shipments of non-essential goods to its warehouses resulted in supply disruption. From May to July, a twelve month low of the top Amazon sellers offered Prime shipping for most of their catalog.