Amazon has increased the number of placements promoting its brands. Out of twelve ad spots on its website and six on its mobile app, three feature its private label products, for some searches. Amazon is giving up advertising revenue it would have made otherwise by selling ads to brands to promote products which profit is unlikely to offset the loss.
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Amazon is spending on marketing to increase the number of shoppers, which attracts brands to buy more advertising, recouping most of Amazon’s marketing expenses. The company spent $4.8 billion on marketing-related expenses in the first quarter of 2020 but captured $3.9 in revenues from hosting advertising. That’s 81% of marketing expenses covered by advertising revenue.
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Amazon's sales growth is unrelated to its catalog increase. No matter how many products Amazon adds to the catalog, there are only 48 items on the first page of search results. The outdated retail concept of the catalog size disregards the nuances of e-commerce, where shelf space has no cost and is thus endless.
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Recent months have highlighted the vulnerability that stems from Amazon’s fulfillment operations: Amazon warehouses and ships practically everything sold on Amazon. The same FBA moat that allows the company to provide a consistent shopping experience despite millions of sellers behind the scenes is a single point of failure. As it tries to protect that single point of failure, it needs increasingly strict quantity restrictions, high fees, and complex rules for sellers using FBA.
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Amazon lost some market share, as measured by web traffic, to the next ten biggest online retail rivals: down from 52% in January to 47% in June. Yet, as the pandemic brought accelerated e-commerce adoption, top players remained the same.
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Amazon will begin displaying the business name and address of sellers in the U.S. marketplace starting September 1st, putting the U.S. marketplace in line with the European, Japan, and Mexico marketplaces, where this information was always available because of local laws.
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The majority of sales volume on the Amazon marketplace comes from sellers that have been on it for years. That signals the controlled churn and high longevity of those businesses. At the same time, new sellers bring incremental growth.
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As the overall Amazon marketplace GMV expands, top sellers represent a shrinking percent. More of the sales come from a broader set of sellers than the top sellers outpacing the rest. The data indicates that it is getting harder for large sellers to continue growing because it is getting easier for new sellers to start selling.
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More brands joined the Walmart marketplace last week than ever before, setting a record for new sellers added in a week. The partnership with Shopify, announced on June 15th, was mostly why more than 1,100 new sellers joined the marketplace. That’s three times more than the average week this year so far.
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Despite Shopify's new-found narrative of being an integrator, it's a poor one. And as a business, it assumes other channels will not succeed, because that would render Shopify obsolete.
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