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.
Walmart Inc., Target Corp., TikTok Shop, Best Buy Co. and Kohl’s Corp. all ran competing sales this year — often beginning earlier and extending longer than Prime Day, according to e-commerce intelligence company Marketplace Pulse.
“The idea that two thirds of the millions of products on Walmart’s site could be produced in America is just a fantasy,” says Ben Donovan, an analyst with Marketplace Pulse, which tracks e-commerce data.
Learning from Amazon, Walmart also opened its e-commerce platform to international sellers in 2021. Four years later, China-based vendors account for one-third of the 200,000 active sellers on Walmart’s online marketplace. “A third-party marketplace alleviates a lot of those pressures because the responsibility of tariffs is not on Walmart, but on the third-party seller,” Donovan says.
While Amazon takes the lead in general merchandise purchases, accounting for some 73% of gross merchandise value, Walmart is catching up. Speaking at a recent Oppenheimer investor conference, CFO John David Rainey shared that about half of its GMV growth in general merchandise has been from its marketplace business.
Overall Walmart’s marketplace revenues grew 34% in the last fiscal year and Marketplace Pulse estimates there are 150,000 sellers on the platform.
Citing comments from Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, Donovan explained that US sellers sourcing from Chinese manufacturers often have to deal with intermediary suppliers, whereas Chinese firms are selling directly to US consumers, and so have “a significantly lower baseline” when it comes to cost.
The backdrop for this situation, he added, is that Chinese sellers have steadily gained market share on Amazon’s marketplace, surpassing the 50% threshold in January as US sellers fell to about 45%, per a report from Marketplace Pulse.
"Despite promises that tariffs will help American businesses, historical evidence shows they simply make products more expensive for American consumers while failing to shift market share to domestic sellers," said Ben Donovan, analyst at e-commerce consultancy Marketplace Pulse.
Chinese sellers overtook Americans on Amazon in 2024, accounting for more than half of top 10,000 sellers by revenue, according to Marketplace Pulse.
On Walmart Marketplace, Chinese sellers now account for around 28% of active merchants, up from less than 1% at the start of 2021, Marketplace Pulse said.
Nearly 62% of units sold on Amazon in the fourth quarter last year came from third-party sellers, according to research firm Marketplace Pulse.
Research published by Marketplace Pulse in January shows Chinese sellers make up half of Amazon’s top US marketplace vendors and may serve as a major driver of the company’s advertising revenue.
The new order will also impact many third-party sellers on Amazon’s marketplace. Marketplace Pulse research reports that China-based sellers represent nearly 50% of the top 10,000 sellers on Amazon in the U.S., a group that contributes almost half of the third-party gross merchandise value on Amazon.
China-based sellers have more than a 50% market share on Amazon’s third-party seller marketplace, according to MarketPlace Pulse.
Third-party sellers — who make up 60% of Amazon’s sales — are under even more pressure.
Marketplace Pulse estimates that Chinese sellers account for half of Amazon’s U.S. third-party sales, meaning tariffs could either eat into margins or push up consumer prices.
Wall Street has been debating in recent weeks just how much Amazon could be hit by increased tariffs. China-based sellers have more than 50% market share on Amazon's third-party seller marketplace, according to research from MarketPlace Pulse.
Chinese sellers now represent 28% of all active third-party sellers on Walmart, according to Marketplace Pulse. "They are trying to replicate as many of the routes to growth as Amazon has modeled," Ben Donovan, insights lead for Marketplace Pulse, told Modern Retail. "That was a big part of [Amazon's] strategy to open up the selection, to really court Chinese sellers and invite them to be a main part of the platform.”
Some 41% of new sellers on Walmart Marketplace were from China in 2024, up from 16% in 2023, according to e-commerce research company Marketplace Pulse.
The concerns being aired by Detlefsen and his group of fellow Amazon business owners are not new, but have mounted in recent years as the market share of China-based sellers on Amazon’s U.S. shopping site has crossed 50%, according to estimates by the e-commerce data firm Marketplace Pulse.
The number of Chinese businesses selling through Amazon Marketplace has steadily risen, many based in the electronics hub Shenzhen. In the UK they made up 39% of the top 10,000 sellers in December, up from 20% eight years ago, according to Marketplace Pulse, an e-commerce research firm.
China-based merchants have made up a sizable contingent of Amazon’s marketplace for many years, though the company acknowledged for the first time in 2023 that they account for a “significant portion.” By some estimates, they outnumber American sellers on the platform, according to data from Marketplace Pulse.
Last year, Chinese third-party sellers became an outright majority of all sellers on Amazon, and they dominate the top sellers list, according to Marketplace Pulse data. Walmart’s third-party marketplace is now made up of 30% Chinese seller accounts, up from 20% a year ago.
The company, founded in 2018, spearheaded a wave of “Amazon aggregators” that grew at a blistering pace to attract over $16bn in capital mostly in 2021, according to Marketplace Pulse.
China’s Xiaomi, the world’s third-largest smartphone maker, and electric vehicle powerhouse BYD have focused on the rest of the world outside the United States. The United States is probably the largest market for Temu but “just barely,” said Juozas Kaziukenas, founder of the e-commerce research firm Marketplace Pulse.
As such, RedNote is probably just a cultural blip, at least where brands are concerned, according to Juozas Kaziukėnas, founder of Marketplace Pulse.
“RedNote is a blink of a moment, like a small, knee-jerk reaction thing,” he said. “It’s not going to be the place for TikTok users to go and somehow continue doing their thing.”