1,000 new sellers join Amazon marketplaces daily, however few of them become long-term sellers. That's why it is important to look at how many active sellers there is at any given point. We define active seller as a seller who has received at least 1 feedback reviews in a month. We first looked at this data in May, so this time we can compare to see how much have all marketplaces grown since.
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To help customers understand which sellers shouldn't be bought from we launched Scam Sellers at www.scamsellers.com. In August we started paying attention to the fraudulent sellers issue when we noticed that there is a growing amount of scamming activity on Amazon. Sellers would join the marketplace, promise great pricing for popular products, but fail to ship any of them. However by noting a 2-4 week shipping time they are often able to deposit their earnings from Amazon before they get suspended, and by the time customers start to wonder.
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eBay was founded on September 3, 1995, 21 years ago, and since then ecommerce as a whole has changed drastically. Yet as we found in our research many of the retailers from 90's are still around today. 19,000 stores were launched this year. Yet there are stores still operating since eBay launch.
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English-speaking countries make up most of the list, with US shops at 75% of total shops, followed by United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia. Since launch in 2005, 11 years ago, Etsy has been most visible there, however as it grew bigger and as international shipping got easier and more affordable many more sellers joined the platform. 10% of Etsy shops are from all over the world.
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Amazon USA marketplace added 54,000 new sellers in a month. 120,000 new sellers joined all Amazon marketplaces in a month. Since we looked at this back in July, the growth rate has accelerated and Amazon USA has remained growing at a steady pace.
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November had Black Friday and Cyber Monday, both of which eBay was betting big on too. eBay reported that 7:00pm PST was the peak shopping time on mobile and overall. eBay also reported that mobile GMV (gross merchandise volume) share vs. desktop increased 15% year-over-year.
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Just last month it was all about Halloween, but it immediately switched to Christmas gifts buying. Sellers like JAF GIFTS or Christmas Central are first to have massive growth because of it. The trend we are noticing is sellers focused on a specific category of products, like Christmas gifts, having the best pricing and products. Big sellers with thousands of brands are having a hard time competing with so many niche sellers.
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Adobe Digital Insights estimates Thanksgiving to Cyber Monday 5-day period sales at $12.8 billion, up by 15.2% from last year. It is hard to estimate how much of that was Amazon sales, but we think it was somewhere in the range of 25-50%. So with $3.2-6.4 billion in sales by Amazon during the holiday weekend we think it is safe to assume at least $1b in sales was from marketplace sellers.
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A very interesting metric for us is what sort of brands are on sale on Amazon, how many sellers sell them and how brands grow and shrink on the marketplace. A lot of the brands offered by a single seller or two are misspelled or mistaken brands. Of the 1,357,529 total brands on Amazon, at least a half could be discarded as duplicates. Each seller on average has 68 brands. However this average number is meaningless as it hides the distribution - most sellers have 10 or less brands.
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Earlier this month Foursquare estimated that foot traffic to stores will be down by 3.5% during the Black Friday sales day. Now that the Black Friday has passed we are seeing reports that this prediction was largely true. Online though, Black Friday set an estimated new record with $3.34 billion in sales, up by 22% from last year. Mobile accounted for $1.2 billion, a 33% increase from the year before.
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