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.
Read more
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.
Read more
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.
Read more
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.
Read more
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.
Read more
Amazon, not unlike other retailers, is making the shopping event starting on Thanksgiving calmer. Deals are no longer constrained to Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Instead, they are spread out over days leading up to it and continue once it is over.
Read more
In September, Amazon expanded product reviews by allowing shoppers to leave a star rating without a written review. For example, the Apple AirPods received, on average, 20 new reviews a day. Since the introduction of ratings, the rate of reviews didn't change, but consumers leave an additional 30 ratings per day.
Read more
While many have tried to combine product discovery and commerce, Instagram is the closest. The app has become the dominant platform for discovery, especially in the clothing and beauty categories. However, the friction of making a purchase after discovering a product on the app has been significant. Instagram is now solving that.
Read more
There are close to 3 million active sellers on Amazon marketplaces worldwide, an increase of 17.7% in a year. A seller is active if they have products listed for sale. Less than 10% of the active sellers were able to achieve $100,000 in yearly sales, and only 1% reached $1 million in sales.
Read more
US e-commerce grew 17.3% in the third quarter, the fastest growth since the fourth quarter of 2011 more than seven years ago. Retailers generated $145.7 billion in online sales in the third quarter compared to $124.2 billion a year ago.
Read more
