Effective March 1st, 2017 there were two major changes which affected books sellers. To understand how this affected the market we looked at sales by books sellers on both Amazon and eBay and how it changed over time.
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At least 55 cents of every new dollar spent in US e-commerce is on Amazon, and analysts estimate that by 2021 Amazon will account for more than 50% of all US e-commerce spending. We think e-commerce business which fail to realize where the market is heading are going to waste a lot of resources trying to compete in a market they cannot win. Un-Amazon-Able are the only brands and e-commerce businesses that will be able to survive Amazon's growing e-commerce presence.
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eBay's future, at least in public, has been about structured data, new user experience development and efforts around AI and machine learning. eBay has been talking about the structured data initiative since at least the start of 2015, so it's been two years, and there isn't yet much to show for it. We think the biggest issue with the structured data initiative is it is taking too long.
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India will eventually become the second largest e-commerce market in the world, overtaking US in the next 10 or so years. There are four players in the Indian market: Flipkart, Amazon, Snapdeal, and Paytm. However the market is shifting towards only three: Flipkart-Snapdeal, Amazon, and Alibaba-Paytm. Recent Alibaba investments into Paytm took its stake to over 50%. And Flipkart-Snapdeal merger seems to be just a matter of time.
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We looked at the top eBay US stores to see where they are located. We found that roughly 30% of the top 10,000 sellers are based in China.
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New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo is proposing several tax-related changes in the 2017-2018 Executive Budget Bill, one of which is the marketplace sales tax. The bill effectively shifts the sales tax collection burden from the seller to the marketplace.
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In an unexpected turn of events Rakuten sellers received an email saying that their seller privileges are to be terminated because Rakuten is "focusing our efforts on a very limited assortment of products and merchants in the near term".
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China's e-commerce market is larger than any other country's in the world - it represents almost a half of e-commerce sales worldwide. While US retailers on Amazon are starting to feel the competition of Chinese competitors, the question is how is this competition going to go the other way.
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Today Etsy reported Q4 2016 and full year results and all the numbers look great. Sellers sold $2.8 billion worth of products, up by 19.0% from a year ago.
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In the 2016 Q4 earnings report published today Walmart reported promising results for Walmart e-commerce. The 29% growth reported today is the highest in 3 years since 2013 Q4. Walmart also confirmed that there are now more than 35 million SKUs on Walmart.com.
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