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.
Juozas Kaziukėnas, the CEO of e-commerce analytics firm Marketplace Pulse, tells me that while Amazon’s knock-off products are “captivating,” there are more “impactful anti-competitive issues” that sellers and regulators should worry about.
“The third-party sellers carry virtually no inventory risk,” says Kaziukėnas. “For its own private label business, Amazon has to store, import and liquidate products.”
“Overall, I think live commerce remains an interesting space for experimentation, but I’ve seen little evidence consumers actually want to see it.” said Juozas Kaziukėnas, founder and CEO of Marketplace Pulse. “YouTube has been trying various shopping experiments for years and they haven’t yet figure out how to make them work. So I wouldn’t expect too much out of this.”
“Amazon is the largest retailer experimenting with live commerce, but its lackluster content is embarrassing and few Amazon shoppers are even aware it exists,” said Kaziukėnas. “There are also live commerce focused startups, but they tend to lack the selection of products and it’s unclear if there is great demand from users to use separate apps for live commerce,” added Kaziukėnas.
Kaziukėnas, however, isn’t so sure that the U.S. is going to have a livestream shopping revolution similar to what happened overseas. “The idea that e-commerce features popular elsewhere can be transplanted into the U.S. is not always true,” he added.
“Companies in the West haven’t figured out the right formula for content quality, product selection and consumer touch-points to make live streaming work. Either the content is poor, or products are not interesting, or the whole experience lives in a separate app users don’t have,” said Kaziukėnas.
"The gold rush to fund aggregators has disappeared," Juozas Kaziukėnas, Marketplace Pulse's founder, told Insider.
"To me, the term consolidation means when a few leaders combine to form an even bigger leader," Kaziukėnas said. "In this space, we don't really have that many succeeding aggregators yet."
"This type of period is much easier for the smaller folks who have less brands and who have done less acquisitions because they can adjust with more agility, as opposed to the bigger ones who have already bought up things and now have to build the plane while flying," Kaziukėnas said.
Before the Supreme Court’s ruling, Plan B was not in high demand on Amazon.com Inc. It was roughly the 10,000th most-searched item, according to e-commerce industry researcher Marketplace Pulse, which analyzes data from Amazon. On June 24, the day of the abortion-rights decision, it ranked within the online retailer’s top 100 search results. Amazon did not immediately respond to request for comment.
Between 2016 and the end of 2020, the proportion of the top 10,000 sellers on Amazon based in China went from one in five to nearly one in two, according to data from research firm Marketplace Pulse. (Sellers were ranked by seller feedback, a proxy for their revenue on Amazon.)
That was actually a subset of the total. Amazon bans sellers all the time, for infractions including poor-quality items and using disallowed “black hat” tactics to boost the rankings of items, says Juozas Kaziukėnas, founder of Marketplace Pulse. This could explain why the Shenzhen Cross-border E-commerce Association has said that the total number of accounts banned by Amazon in the spring and summer of 2021 exceeded 50,000, he adds.
“This whole system has created a massive issue for Amazon because the consumer can’t pick the best product for any search anymore, because they’re all essentially the same,” says Mr. Kaziukėnas.
“For a while Shopify could do no wrong,” said ecommerce analyst Juozas Kaziukenas from Marketplace Pulse. “The broader industry was hoping Shopify would compete directly with Amazon. But obviously that hasn’t happened yet, and it’s unclear if that will ever happen.”
“Amazon’s ambitions for advertising span significantly beyond turning more of Amazon into advertising space. That’s where I think efforts like local ads will play a part, “ said Founder and CEO of Marketplace Pulse Juozas Kaziukėnas.
But Juozas Kaziukėnas, the founder of e-commerce research firm Marketplace Pulse, said it can be hard to independently know what actually caused those declines — whether it’s Amazon’s policies or other factors.
According to Marketplace Pulse, the share of top China-based merchants has steadily been declining on Amazon’s third-party marketplace since late 2020, a trend some experts believe may be caused by pandemic-induced supply chain snafus and the company’s recent efforts to crack down on prohibited activity, including fake reviews. Last year, the company suspended several prominent China-based sellers and reportedly kicked off 50,000 merchants for violating its rules.
Marketplace Pulse’s data shows 55% of the top sellers on Amazon’s U.S. marketplace are domestic businesses, a jump from 48% in November 2020.
Over the past few years, Chinese merchants sold a growing percentage of what Americans bought on Amazon until there was a roughly 50-50 split between sellers based in the U.S. and China. The percentage sold by Chinese merchants, however, has declined to about 42 percent in May from about 48 percent in late 2020, according to the e-commerce research firm Marketplace Pulse.
I asked Juozas Kaziukėnas, the founder of Marketplace Pulse, whether this shift away from Chinese merchants was caused by temporary closures of factories in China related to the pandemic and the increased costs and complexity of shipping products from Asia. He said probably not. Most merchants based in the U.S. buy and ship from manufacturers in China or elsewhere in Asia, too.
Kaziukėnas said that it’s difficult to know exactly what caused the change, but some merchants have been frustrated with the increasing costs and Byzantine rules on Amazon. There have been news reports from China of product sellers hoping to find websites other than Amazon to sell their goods to the world. Those gripes about the downsides of selling on Amazon are definitely not new, however, and are commonly expressed by merchants outside China, too.
Shipping and fulfillment costs have increased significantly in the inflationary environment, causing sellers to raise prices or accept lower margins, said Juozas Kaziukėnas, the CEO of the research firm Marketplace Pulse. Consumer prices for online shopping have jumped by over 10% since June 2020, data from Profitero shows.
"It ultimately means shoppers are paying more for the same goods," Kaziukėnas said.
Juozas Kaziukenas, founder and CEO of Marketplace Pulse, agreed with Sebastian that subsequent quarters should take care of the over-capacity issue. He added that with ecommerce demand being pulled forward and then back again by the pandemic cycle, “it’s back on the trendline it was before COVID, and so is Amazon.”
“So, Amazon failing to grow in Q1 only looks bad when ignoring the two-year context,” he said. “Quarters to come are much more important as they will be compared against 2021 which was no longer boosted by COVID. If Amazon is still showing weak growth in Q3 and beyond this year, then that’s a concern.”
Meanwhile, the total value of goods sold on Amazon’s site in 2021 grew at half the rate it did in 2020, according to an analysis by research firm Marketplace Pulse.
At Amazon, the total value of goods sold grew in 2021 at half the rate it did in 2020, according to an analysis by research firm Marketplace Pulse.
Investors poured more than $14 billion in equity and debt combined into the space over the past two years, according to an analytics
firm Marketplace Pulse. As many as 100 rollup startups were founded over that period.
Juozas Kaziukėnas, the founder of the e-commerce research firm Marketplace Pulse, posed a question to me a couple of months ago that I haven’t been able to forget: Did the coronavirus really compel us to shop online more — or just shop more, period?
Listing new sellers on its marketplace is especially important to the company as it competes for sellers and buyers with Amazon. Marketplace Pulse puts Walmart sellers at 136,000 compared to the over six million on Amazon.
But those efforts have so far only succeeded in capturing a tiny sliver of the overall e-commerce market, said Juozas Kaziukėnas, founder and CEO of the e-commerce research firm Marketplace Pulse. “We’ve been talking about live commerce and social commerce for years and have little progress to show for it.” he said.
“If anyone can figure out live commerce, it won’t be Amazon, Walmart or any other incumbent, but instead platforms like TikTok that already have the attention of users,” Kaziukėnas said. “It is more likely that TikTok will learn how to add shopping than Amazon will learn how to become social.”
Amazon has more than 400 different private brands, according to estimates.
Research firm Marketplace Pulse estimates Walmart added about 8,000 sellers from China from March 2021 to mid-January 2022, accounting for almost all of its new international sellers and 14% of total new merchants. “WFS makes the seller’s business location practically invisible to shoppers since Walmart ships orders from domestic warehouses on the seller’s behalf,” wrote Juozas Kaziukenas, chief executive officer of the researcher, in a December report. “FBA played a crucial role in unlocking Amazon for international sellers, and the same [is] playing out on Walmart.”
“Getting N95 masks for kids seems to be surging in waves -- first in August 2021, and now in January,” said Juozas Kaziukenas, founder of Marketplace Pulse, which monitors consumer demand on Amazon and other online stores.