Journalists all over the world rely on Marketplace Pulse insights and data for their stories. Marketplace Pulse works with leading magazines, newspapers, and online publications, including The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Bloomberg, and CNBC.
Journalists all over the globe rely on our insights and data for their stories. Here are some of the most recent articles Marketplace Pulse was featured in.
Amazon’s total gross merchandise volume in 2020 was about $490 billion. According to Marketplace Pulse, $300 billion of that came from third-party sellers.
The companies they're starting, known as Amazon aggregators, have received a whopping $4.1 billion of debt and equity funding since March of last year, estimates e-commerce data firm Marketplace Pulse.
"The next 12 months the industry will shake out and some of the companies will end up shutting their doors,” said Juozas Kaziukėnas, CEO of Marketplace Pulse. He predicted that some will not last a year. “A lot of the money these companies are getting is through debt rather than equity. The debt has to be paid, so if they can’t acquire sellers fast enough, I’m not sure how you’re going to pay the bills.”
Walmart won't disclose figures, but according to e-commerce data firm Marketplace Pulse, it had fewer than 7,000 sellers at the beginning of 2017. Since then, Walmart has added around 80,000 merchants.
Going after more sellers could come with risks. In particular, the move to open its platform to sellers outside the US could expose Walmart to more fake and poor-quality items, Juozas Kaziukenas, the founder of Marketplace Pulse, said. The US Government Accountability Office said in a 2018 report that 88% of counterfeit goods in 2016 arriving in the United States came from China and Hong Kong.
“It creates excitement out of nowhere, right out of a vacuum,” Marketplace Pulse founder and CEO Juozas Kaziukenas said about Prime Day.
“People will just buy more things ... and maybe it is a good time to do it in June, earlier,” he said. “Because there’s a lot of excitement about things getting back to normal, and people probably are going to be buying more clothing items and more travel-related items — that they have not been buying for a very long time.”
“I would imagine Pakistan is a few years behind China in terms of expertise in selling to the West directly,” said Juozas Kaziukėnas, founder and CEO of the e-commerce research firm Marketplace Pulse. “The explosion of Chinese sellers came in 2015 and is still continuing, but that is a snowball effect that was accelerated by successful local sellers, local support, etc.”
Juozas Kaziukėnas, founder and CEO of Marketplace Pulse, describes those brands as the "Amazon seller 3.0." Instead of reselling or slapping a name onto a generic product easily sourced online from overseas, Amazon-native brands have been looking to differentiate themselves with designs, trademarks, patents and the like.
In other words, they are trying to make a product that can't be "blindly replicated by someone going to Alibaba.com and sourcing a product," Kaziukėnas said in an interview.
Today, nearly two-thirds of sellers on Amazon.com in the U.S. use FBA, according to Marketplace Pulse, a research firm.
Walmart Marketplace grew to an estimated 70,000 sellers in 2020, fueled by a surge in online shopping due to the Covid-19 pandemic and a series of investments in technology and vendor relationships reported here for the first time. That is expected to rise 146% by the end of 2022, according to projections by data firm Marketplace Pulse that have not yet been published.
For both companies, “it’s a no brainer to look at your web properties and say wow, we have millions of users, they already start shopping here, we should bring the transactions closer to them,” said Juozas Kaziukėnas, CEO of the e-commerce marketplace tracker Marketplace Pulse.
“The number of sellers using WFS has grown to 1,100,” said Juozas Kaziukėnas, CEO of the e-commerce marketplace tracker Marketplace Pulse. “That’s roughly 4% of active sellers, but a number that has nearly tripled in six months since October (400).” (That number includes only the sellers who are actively using WFS, and not necessarily all of the newly accepted sellers who haven’t yet enrolled.)
Google has nothing as alluring as the $295 billion that passed through Amazon’s third-party marketplace in 2020. The amount of goods people buy on Google is “very small” by comparison — probably around $1 billion, said Juozas Kaziukenas, the founder of Marketplace Pulse, a research company.
According to ecommerce research firm Marketplace Pulse, there are now more than six million third-party sellers on Amazon, whose total sales exceeded an estimated $300bn in 2020. This dwarfs the $190bn estimated to have been sold directly by Amazon.
Amazon claimed the change was about securing the personal information of users, “pure and simple”. Juozas Kaziukenas, the founder of e-commerce research firm Marketplace Pulse, said it would sever the last direct link between those vendors and their customers. “Over the past couple of years, Amazon has disconnected sellers from consumers. The reality is that these are Amazon’s customers, they’re not sellers’ customers, at least as far as Amazon is concerned,” he said.
Retail analyst Juozas Kaziukenas at Marketplace Pulse in New York reckons TikTok is “6 to 12 months” behind Instagram and Facebook with its effort to build in-app ecommerce.
For Chinese manufacturers, U.S. marketplaces have become a popular way to reach American customers. In January, Chinese merchants represented 75% of new Amazon marketplace sellers, an increase from 47% a year earlier, according to researcher Marketplace Pulse, which monitors the site. Walmart will likely see a similar ratio, the firm estimates.
“This will get Walmart more selection, more affordable goods that already dominate Amazon best-sellers lists,” said Juozas Kaziukenas, founder and CEO of Marketplace Pulse. “To an investor, that reads as positive news.”
Juozas Kaziukenas, the chief executive of Marketplace Pulse, an e-commerce research firm, estimates that Marketplace sellers moved more than $300 billion of product in 2020 — a figure that would make Amazon Marketplace, in his words, “the 42nd largest economy in the world by GDP. ” (As of 2021, Marketplace accounts for more than half of products sold on Amazon.com and is growing at a faster rate than Amazon’s own retail business, according to the company.)
That billion dollars raises other prospects, however. “Once you raise this level of capital, the only acceptable outcome is some sort of exit,” said Mr. Kaziukenas, of Marketplace Pulse. Indeed, Mr. Silberstein said, attempting to take the company public is, at this point, “an inevitability.” Competition is fierce. Prices for some listings are crossing into speculative territory and raising concerns about something of a mini-bubble for Amazon listings.
“It’s not peaking yet,” said Mr. Kaziukenas. “I think the peak is going to be when some of these aggregators start to fail.”
In 2020 overall, Shopify’s merchants sold $119.6 billion in goods, which represents 40% of the total value of goods sold on Amazon’s third-party marketplace.
Marketplace Pulse, which analyzes e-commerce, has said that nearly half of Amazon’s top sellers—those with more than a million dollars in annual sales in the U.S.—are in China.
Amazon is also a partner with approximately 2.4 million active marketplace sellers, who generate the majority of sales on its retail platform.
“Amazon’s competition like Walmart and Target have finally started to make the right moves and are enjoying success in markets where Amazon is lacking, like online grocery,” Juozas “Joe” Kaziukenas, founder of Marketplace Pulse, which covers Amazon told The Post.