Without the high-margin advertising revenue, Amazon's retail business is increasingly unprofitable. It was at break-even as recently as 2015. Since then, as advertising revenue grew, so did Amazon's use of that growth to fund the rest of the retail operations.
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$600 billion worth of goods were sold on Amazon in 2021. The total gross merchandise volume (GMV), including sales by Amazon itself and by the marketplace, doubled in three years. Most of that growth came from the marketplace.
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Twenty-five cents of every dollar spent shopping online goes to the Amazon third-party marketplace. Were Amazon's marketplace an independent platform, it would be the largest online retailer in the U.S.
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A growing share of sales on eBay comes from sellers selling on it for over five years. More than half, from those who joined ten years ago. That indicates shrinking interest from new sellers.
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Amazon has been unable to unlock live commerce three years after launching Live in February 2019. Its amateur content didn’t attract viewers and, without users, brands and influencers are unwilling to commit to it.
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Amazon ranked fourth in global shopping app downloads in 2021 - they were the number one most-downloaded app in 2020. Amazon is still first in the U.S. rankings, but Shopee, Shein, and Meesho leapfrogged it in global rankings.
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The fourth edition of Year in Review is a collection of stories, insights, and data, all told through forty charts. 2021 was the year of broken supply chains, Amazon aggregators, more advertising, Shopify's almost-marketplace, and one unanswered question - did the pandemic boost e-commerce after all?
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Amazon aggregators raised over $12 billion in 2021 - that's at least a billion dollars for twelve months in a row. The amount raised includes both equity and debt financing.
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Amazon seller valuations have doubled since the start of 2020. There were only a few buyers then, and the concept of selling an Amazon seller business seemed far-fetched. Sellers were heavily undervalued, and the market is now catching up.
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Shopify insists that they won't build a marketplace, but the Shop app has recently become one. The app now allows discovering merchants, adding their items to a shopping cart, and checking out - all without leaving the app.
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