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Amazon's retail sales are down to only 50% of the company's total revenue. It now generates nearly as much revenue from its services businesses like AWS cloud hosting, Prime memberships, the third-party marketplace, and advertising.

The list of best-sellers on Amazon is different day-to-day. And it’s not new trends replacing old ones. Instead, it is brands that didn’t exist just recently pushing out other short-lived brands. Unrecognizable, unpronounceable, and unmemorable and only created for the sake of selling on Amazon.

Amazon reduced the transaction fee to 5% from the typical 15% for sales originating from brands bringing the shopper to Amazon. Amazon is trying to incentivize brands to invest in marketing on platforms like Facebook and Google but link to Amazon instead of their e-commerce website.

Walmart marketplace has doubled in size in twelve months to reach 100,000 third-party sellers. It has doubled for the second year in a row.

Amazon has suspended hundreds of top Chinese sellers over the past two months. The company seems to be just now enforcing its rules for blatant policy violations like manipulating customer reviews. Tactics that some of those sellers have used for years.

Prime Day is an event that Amazon can place anywhere on the calendar and generate a sales boost. However, seven years after the first Prime Day, it is clear that Amazon is out of ideas on how to turn it into a recognized shopping holiday like Alibaba's Singles Day.

Advertising on Amazon now costs, on average, $1.20 per click. Up 30% from $0.93 at the start of the year and up over 50% year-over-year. Demand for advertising on Amazon is rising faster than the ad inventory on and off Amazon, thus driving up advertising prices.

An increasing percentage of sales on the Amazon marketplace comes from sellers that have been on it for years. More than half, from those who joined in 2017 or earlier. At the same time, new sellers are finding opportunities and bring incremental marketplace growth.

Amazon has expanded the list of countries accepted to register for selling on Amazon to 188 countries. The company added 85 new countries, mainly in Central Asia, Middle East, South America, and Africa.

US e-commerce reached market share levels it would have only gotten to in 2022. According to the Department of Commerce, e-commerce represented 13.4% of total retail spending in Q1 2021. Before the pandemic, it was expected to be 12.3%.