Articles

Apr 18, 2017

Walmart Is Doing a Real-Life Test - Are American Shoppers More Cheap Than They Are Lazy?

Last week Walmart announced a new initiative - discounts for products ordered online, but picked up in stores. By the end of June the program is expected to expand to include over 1 million products. This is the opposite of what Amazon is doing. Amazon is building features for convenience, like same-day delivery in major cities. Thus this change by Walmart raises a question - are shoppers more cheap than they are lazy?

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Apr 13, 2017

China's Share of Amazon Marketplace Is Likely as Much as 25%

Given the recent change in the US government, and policies yet to come, the question of how big of a role China plays in Amazon business is very interesting. The takeaway from this research is not the exact percentage of Chinese sellers. It's the fact that there are more Chinese sellers than one might assume, they are very competitive because of FBA, and the ratio is no doubt growing.

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Apr 12, 2017

India Is the Most Important E-Commerce Battleground to Watch

India will eventually become the second largest e-commerce market in the world, overtaking US in the next 10 or so years. There are four players in the Indian market: Flipkart, Amazon, Snapdeal, and Paytm. However the market is shifting towards only three: Flipkart-Snapdeal, Amazon, and Alibaba-Paytm. Recent Alibaba investments into Paytm took its stake to over 50%. And Flipkart-Snapdeal merger seems to be just a matter of time.

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Apr 11, 2017

Forget Stealing from Retail Stores, and Hacking Websites - Hackers Have Their Targets on Amazon Seller Accounts

Amazon marketplace has advanced from a website where people list some random products on, to a platform where true retailers build their business. This meant that gaining access to a seller's Amazon account is potentially very lucrative. Not only can a hacker use it to gain insight about the seller's business, best products, ads performance, etc., but also cause big cashflow issues. We think the attacks on Amazon seller's accounts are only going to get more aggressive and sophisticated. Crime is moving online, and Amazon seller accounts are one of the targets.

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Apr 5, 2017

Amazon Cash Is a Bigger Move Than It Appears

We wanted to elaborate on why Amazon launched Amazon Cash, and why payments are key. In the US it is easy to underestimate the size of the population without access to credit cards or any type of banking. While it might appear like everyone has a credit card, it couldn't be further from the truth. This move thus enables access to Amazon.com for millions of new customers.

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Apr 4, 2017

Becoming a Top Amazon Marketplace Seller Takes Years

This time we looked at how many of the top Amazon sellers have joined in the past 365 days. It is an interesting number to look at because as we found, it shows that it takes a while to become a top seller. We found that just 5.6% of top 10,000 sellers joined during the past 365 days.

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Apr 3, 2017

Verified Sellers - the Future of Amazon Marketplace?

We think Amazon should introduce a Verified Seller status. A verified seller is checked by Amazon to have a valid business, no history of counterfeit, good rating, etc., but also willing to publish their business information. It's a seller who doesn't need to hide behind the anonymous name.

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Mar 31, 2017

Amazon Is an E-Commerce Infrastructure Company, Not a Retailer

Amazon is positioning themselves as a e-commerce infrastructure company, not a retailer. Their message to big brands is that they are not selling products to Amazon for resale, but instead using Amazon as a platform to reach a massive audience, and using their infrastructure to facilitate all e-commerce tasks. In this view, Amazon is not a middleman, but instead an enabler.

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Mar 29, 2017

Walmart Marketplace Is Roughly 1% of Amazon.com Marketplace Size

Since Walmart marketplace has been receiving a lot of attention from marketplace sellers, we decided to investigate how big the opportunity of selling on Walmart really is. We found one way to look at it - by comparing seller feedback. By comparing all feedback received by all Amazon sellers, to all feedback received by all Walmart sellers, we could get a relative number.

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Mar 28, 2017

Amazon Lost over $7 Billion Last Year by Providing Free Shipping

Last year Amazon collected $8.9 billion in shipping revenue, but spent $16.2 billion on shipping costs. Thus the net shipping cost is $7.2 billion. Because of the growth in Amazon Prime membership and the current $25 minimum to get free shipping, fewer people are paying for shipping. This has resulted in shipping costs growing faster than shipping revenue. As shown in the chart below, during the busy Christmas periods the difference is very large.

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