Articles

Google Shopping now lets any retailer or brand to list their products for free. Before, merchants paid Google every time someone clicked through to their website from a Google Shopping product listing. Google’s latest attempt in e-commerce is aggregating shopping websites, a strategy it first tried a decade ago.

The number of AmazonBasics best-sellers has more than doubled in two years - from 660 in April 2018 to surpassing 1,300 this April. For the past twelve months, it has been growing at a steady 47% year-over-year. Amazon continues to launch new products, validate demand for them, and stop selling those that fail to attract customers.

Amazon's decision in March to temporarily stop accepting shipments of non-essential goods to its warehouses has resulted in dwindling Prime supply as sellers run out of stock of items stored in FBA. Less than 80% of the top Amazon sellers offer Prime shipping for more than half of their assortment, down from 87% a few months ago.

Thousands of shoppers on Walmart were recently disappointed when shopping for face masks and other essential items. The Walmart marketplace is to blame. A few dozen fraudulent sellers used fake tracking numbers and other tricks to accept orders that never reached the consumers.

Competing marketplaces are not seeing a significant acceleration in new sellers as Amazon's fulfillment struggles caused sellers to reevaluate their dependence on the Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) service. One month after Amazon started prioritizing the stocking of essentials and high-demand items in its warehouses, making many sellers that used the FBA service to look for other warehousing providers, it didn't drive sellers to look for alternative marketplaces.

Amazon has removed the deals page and product recommendations from its homepage, eliminated the frequently bought together list for each product and is no longer accepting new discount coupons from brands. The company has implemented these changes over the past thirty days to achieve something it never did before - to reduce shopping on Amazon.

Customer satisfaction with Amazon marketplace sellers reached a new low in March, driven by order cancelations, long delivery estimates, fake tracking numbers, price gauging, and other issues. In the U.S., 92% of customers had a positive experience last month, down from 95% a year ago.

Demand for online groceries has surged during the COVID-19 pandemic, and Walmart is a clear winner so far. Walmart Grocery became the number one most downloaded app in the Shopping category on the iPhone App Store. Overtaking Amazon’s, as well as other retailer’s apps.

In March, most shoppers on Amazon looked for toilet paper, face masks, hand sanitizers, and other essentials, as well as items for working from home, at home sports equipment, and offline entertainment. However, most of the in-demand searches returned no items in stock.

Amazon India has halted most of its operations as well as deactivated all of the nearly 600,000 marketplace sellers as much of the country is under lockdown to prevent the spread of coronavirus. The country’s 1.3 billion people are in a three-week lockdown.