Walmart reported 2016 Q1 results this week, and while the company has posted positive results and outperformed the estimates, ecommerce growth has been disappointing. Despite big investment into its websites and the Walmart Marketplace, ecommerce sales rose only 7% in the quarter.
China's ecommerce market is already the largest in the world, yet it continues to grow. Despite Alibaba and JD.com facing challenges expanding delivery networks to reach over 1 billion people living in rural areas, both have posted better than average growth numbers in Q1. Alibaba Group reported 24% year-over-year growth of gross merchandise volume (GMV) at $115 billion. JD.com reported it's sales grew by 55% to $20.1 billion.
Amazon.com marketplace has been around for many years, and millions of retailers have tried selling on it. As Amazon launched international websites, they have also been adding marketplaces there as well. Since we are tracking all 11 marketplaces, we have unique visibility into each of their performance. Thus we decided to look at the amount of active marketplace sellers - sellers who we estimate to have sold at least one product in a month.
Walmart launched the Walmart Marketplace in 2009. Since then Walmart has been hard at work perfecting the marketplace and adding key executives to grow it. Currently Walmart has over 500 marketplace sellers, with 200 of them actively selling products (others have joined recently and are yet to have a sale, or have since stopped selling). We are working hard to provide richer information about every seller soon, but you can already see how many products they sell, in which categories they sell and what is the average product price. Furthermore, you can inspect the top sellers by feedback ratings received in the last month, three months, twelve months or lifetime.
We have featured Pharmapacks in many of our fastest growing amazon sellers reports. They are projecting to do between $140 and 160 million in revenue this year, and if all goes well do as much as $300 million in 2017. Keep in mind that they did $32 million in 2014, just two years ago. Only a few sellers ever have achieved such growth.
Amazon finally addressed India’s additional rules governing foreign ownership of e-commerce late last week, amidst news that the global marketplace juggernaut is now set to take the lead as India’s top online marketplace. According to the Economic Times, former market leader Flipkart’s share of shipments fell to 37% in March from 43% in the same month in 2015, and Snapdeal’s fell to 14-15% from 19%. Amazon India’s unit market share surged to an estimated 21-24% from 14%.
In an insightful interview on Freedom Fast Lane podcast, Dan Brenner and AJ Patel discuss their ecommerce business InstaNatural. Based in Orlando, Florida they have been selling across many platforms, but their strongest play so far has been Amazon - Instanatural LLC has been featured in both January and February fastest growing sellers reports this year. Dan and AJ discuss how they got started on Amazon, what it took to achieve $1 million in monthly sales and their plans to go to $10 million and reaching $1 billion in yearly sales.
In the previous fastest growing eBay sellers reports we showcased that top spots were always taken by international sellers. This is not the case this time - Top 3 are all based in the United States. Fastest growing seller is The Stamp Professor by stampprof. Based in Naples, Florida they offer a selection of postal stamps from 1941 all the way to current times. A good example of focusing on a niche and offering a unique selection.
Fastest growing seller in April was petphabet. Launched on Amazon in November last year they have been growing steadily since. They are based in Fremont, California and offer a range of pet products, with a majority of them under their own brand. Before launching on Amazon, they had a successful ecommerce website and social presence. Last week Amazon published 2016 Q1 earnings report which were very promising. Sales were up across the board, with Amazon.com sales growing by 26.7%. Yet the most important metric for us at Marketplace Pulse was that 48% of all sales were done by third-party sellers, like the ones in this top 100 list. This is the highest it has ever been and hopefully it will continue to grow.
Amazon released 2016 Q1 earnings report today, and managed to beat all expectations. Strong revenue and profit numbers, and continuing international growth from the leading global ecommerce company. Amazon.com generated $16,9 billion in sales up by 26.7%, while international (all other marketplaces like Amazon Japan and Amazon Germany) did $9,5 billion in sales up by 23.5% from last year.