Amazon's online sales soared 24% in the first quarter, the fastest pace in four years. Amazon's first-party sales - not the total GMV, including the marketplace, but only sales where Amazon is the retailer - increased at more than twice the rate compared to Q1 2019, despite only part of the quarter affected by the pandemic.
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Share of top Amazon sellers by China-based businesses has been shrinking because of disruption to manufacturing, freight, and warehousing, as well as consumers prioritizing essentials.
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Sales on Etsy have nearly doubled in April compared to last year, and are more than 25% higher than sales during its previous record month - December 2019. During the pandemic, Etsy is breaking records in sales and new sellers joining the marketplace.
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Shopify launched a consumer shopping app, called Shop, on Tuesday. The app is both a glimpse of what a marketplace built of Shopify stores would look like, and an underwhelming first take at appealing to consumers. It does little to drive product discovery for brands on Shopify.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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