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Sales on eBay in the US declined 9% in the fourth quarter, and the number of sold items globally shrunk 4%. In the US, eBay’s market share of online shopping is second only to Amazon, but while the rest of the market is growing, eBay is shrinking.

The number of top Amazon.com sellers based in China has surpassed US sellers. 49% of the top Amazon.com sellers are based in China, and only 47% are US-based. In a year, China-based sellers have grown their share of top Amazon.com sellers from 38% to 49%.

Last year Amazon made it easier for shoppers to leave a star rating by no longer requiring a written review. As a result, popular products on the shopping site are now getting hundreds of ratings a day, while also increasing their overall star rating.

Jet.com website traffic reached an all-time low in December with 1.4 million visits, an otherwise crucial month for retailers. When Walmart acquired Jet in the summer of 2016, the December that followed had 33 million visits.

Amazon has quietly stopped featuring its private label brands it previously showed in a "Top Rated From Our Brands" widget in search results. Recently, the widget is no longer present in search results.

Despite third-party merchants on Amazon seeing double-digit year-over-year growth of worldwide unit sales, surpassing a billion items sold on Amazon, a record 6.4% of customers had a negative experience this holiday season when buying from a third-party merchant.

On December 1st, Walmart disabled next-day delivery nationwide. The company restored it only two weeks later on the 15th. This year’s calendar meant the shortest possible holiday shopping season of 26 days - the number of days between Black Friday and Christmas eve. For more than half of it, the highly promised next-day delivery was absent.

The Year in Review looks at the state of marketplaces and makes predictions on what’s to come next. The report analyzes Amazon, eBay, Walmart, Jet, Target, Wish, and Google marketplaces through more than forty charts based on Marketplace Pulse data. It is our biggest and most comprehensive research report yet.

The best selling winter coat this winter is by a Chinese brand Orolay. In March 2018, the New York magazine wrote an article calling it the Amazon Coat, after it became a small, but growing, trend on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. The coat went viral that winter and a year later is now back to be the best-seller again.

More than ten thousand sellers attended the 5th annual Amazon Global Store Cross-Border Summit held in Shanghai on December 11-12th. Twice as many participated in the live online broadcast because the event was sold out. The event didn’t present any breaking news, but keynote speakers laid out Amazon’s areas of strategic focus in China.