Effective later in the year Amazon sellers fulfilling their own shipments will be forced to accept all returns - items they sell will be "automatically authorized" for return. As much as this change has caused an outburst of anger in seller forums there is going to be more of these in the future.
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There is a lot of talk about Amazon, eBay, Walmart, and others, but most seem to forget that what's driving those leading retailers is the millions of sellers in their marketplaces. This is what started Marketplace Pulse, and we continue to look at, analyze, and talk about marketplaces as if they were economies by themselves.
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Based on our research since the start of the year Etsy has had half a million new sellers join the marketplace. 494,123 to be exact. This amounts to over 70,000 new shops every month, making 2017 the fastest growing year so far.
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According to Amazon's second quarter earnings, company's "other" revenue - believed to be made up mostly of advertising - category grew faster than anything else. It might take years for the advertising business to grow big enough for Amazon to consider breaking it out as a category of its own. But most estimate that by 2018 it will reach north of $5 billion yearly run rate.
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For the first time in Amazon's history the percent of units by marketplace sellers reached 51 percent. This is the first quarter where marketplace sellers contributed more than Amazon itself.
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For a lot of brands this is a big problem since on one hand they can refuse to sell on Amazon, and give up major source of extra revenue, or sell on Amazon, but have no way to interact with customers directly or indirectly.
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A minor misconception about marketplaces is that sellers are contempt with its model. Instead sellers are spending increasing effort to avoid the "marketplace", all to avoid having competition. 27 percent of the top 1,000 sellers, 37 percent of the top 10,000 sellers, and 44 percent of the top 100,000 sellers are selling 3 brands or less.
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eBay 2017 Q2 results mostly met expectations, but at the same time provided little to be excited about. Shares fell as a result. eBay is successfully attracting new buyers, but those buyers buy less and/or buy only once.
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Paytm Mall marketplace, latest entrant into India’s online retail market, has recently removed 85,000 sellers. "There are no faceless names, no ABC whom no one knows, no sellers who do hanky-panky," said Amit Sinha, COO of Paytm, after the change. This is exactly the change we've been vocal about for a while - anyone-can-sell-anything marketplaces are not good enough anymore.
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One of the most commonly asked questions about the Amazon marketplace, apart from how many sellers are selling on the platform, is how many sellers have sales greater than $100 million, or more than $1 million. We finally wanted to tackle this question.
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