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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.

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Modern Retail

"According to Marketplace Pulse..."

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.

Temu Opens Its Marketplace to US-Based Sellers

Business Insider previously reported that US Amazon sellers were largely eager to try selling on Temu once it was made available to them. Notably, the sellers that are on the new US marketplace so far seem to be Chinese sellers who have warehouses in the US, not American-grown brands, according to Marketplace Pulse. Many of them also sell on Amazon.

Business Insider
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Here's how Amazon aggregators are valuing brands now

“The industry is much more quiet and much more deliberately trying to readjust and find something that works while trying to find some way to survive,” he said. “It’s not that roll-ups don’t work — it’s that the particular strategies of the roll-ups don’t work.”

As such, aggregators are pitching themselves as more niche platforms focused on something beyond acquisition at scale. If a company describes itself as an Amazon-only aggregator, “that phrase will get you deleted from the [investor’s inbox],” said Kaziukėnas.

Modern Retail
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US-Based Amazon Sellers Eager for Temu Platform Launch

Industry experts expect the first merchants to make use of the new model will likely be Chinese sellers who have warehouse operations in the US. Many of them also sell on Amazon and use Amazon's fulfillment services.

"What they sell is exactly what is being sold on Temu already," Juozas Kaziukėnas, founder and CEO of e-commerce intelligence firm Marketplace Pulse, said.

"Temu seems to have already started the recruitment of sellers in China," he added, citing Chinese media reports about Temu's attendance at recent seller events in China.

Business Insider
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Win Brands Group had its third round of layoffs in 12 months

“Perhaps the runway that those companies had financially — as well as the patience and willingness by investors to wait even longer — is running out,” said Juozas Kaziukėnas, founder and CEO of Marketplace Pulse, speaking about the aggregator space in general.

These issues were certainly exacerbated by rising interest rates over the last two years. “You cannot operate with expensive debt or expensive capital,” Kaziukėnas said. “If the thing you are using to run these aggregators is expensive capital, it’s near impossible to work. You are just servicing the debt… That is the knife that is killing many of these aggregators”

Modern Retail
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Arnault-Backed Razor Buys Perch in Amazon ‘Aggregator’ Shakeout

“This seems to be the year where the few aggregators that are doing well are raising more capital and swallowing the rest,” said Juozas Kaziukenas, the chief executive officer of Marketplace Pulse, which has tracked the industry. “We’re going to go from about 100 aggregators at the peak to a dozen or so that survive.”

Bloomberg
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TikTok Shop listings are surfacing on Google Shopping

Juozas Kaziukėnas, founder and CEO of retail data analytics firm Marketplace Pulse, said he has also noticed TikTok Shop listings appearing in Google’s Shopping tab recently. “Google remains the most popular search engine for shopping,” Kaziukėnas said, although some data suggests Amazon has overtaken the top spot, “And TikTok capturing some of that is not surprising.”

Kaziukėnas said the way products currently sell on TikTok Shop largely revolves around the content created on the platform to promote the products. “However, it’s not an alternative or replacement for search-based shopping,” Kaziukėnas said.

As a well-established search engine with a major advertising component, Kaziukėnas said Google Shopping results also allow people to compare similar styles, features and prices across retailers. “This is not TikTok’s strength,” he added. “TikTok Shop is for impulse buying when you are flipping through videos on the app, and one of them interests you enough for you to buy the product it is featuring.”

Still, Kaziukėnas doesn’t think TikTok Shop will rely on search-based shopping as a major customer acquisition channel, “and thus their ads on Google shopping are not going to be key drivers.”

“TikTok Shop is a shopping experience self-contained inside of the TikTok app and driven by content, rather than search,” he said.

Modern Retail
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Temu’s Super Bowl 2024 commercial aired 5 times—here are the results

“As low production as it was and as cringey as it might appear to run the same ad five times, it seems to have worked really well in terms of how many people saw it and how many of those people ended up looking for Temu and installing the app,” said Juozas Kaziukėnas, founder and chief executive of Marketplace Pulse, which analyzes e-commerce marketplaces.

Ad Age
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The founder who launched the ‘Amazon of Latin America’ from a parking garage has transformed retail in the region—and earned himself $7 billion

In 2017, the company expanded into the credit business, offering financing to customers and merchants to make purchases, build out their businesses, and even pay taxes. In the third quarter of 2023, fintech accounted for over 43% of MercadoLibre’s revenue of $3.8 billion. “MercadoLibre is really a payments company,” says Juozas Kaziukenas, founder of business intelligence firm Marketplace Pulse.

Fortune
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Meta’s continued rally could hinge on the fortunes of upstart retailers Temu and Shein

Additionally, Amazon has been courting Chinese companies to use its platform and to fend off competition from Temu and Shein. Chinese sellers are buying accompanying ads, helping bolster Amazon’s ballooning advertising business, said Juozas Kaziukenas, CEO of e-commerce intelligence firm Marketplace Pulse.

“It’s really misunderstood and underappreciated how much of the advertising industry directly depends on China,” he said.

CNBC
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Can Alibaba Deliver?

“Alibaba may have started the cross-border e-commerce model before anyone else, but for the majority of the last five to ten years it was very passive in its marketing and developing the product,” says Juozas Kaziukenas, founder of Marketplace Pulse, an e-commerce intelligence firm. “Shein inovated on this by focusing on clothing, a much more tightly controlled supply chain. And Temu launched with very aggressive marketing and budgets nobody else has applied before to Western markets. Only in the last year has Alibaba woken up.”

The Wire China
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Temu is planning to open up its marketplace to U.S. and European sellers

Currently, the research firm Marketplace Pulse estimates Temu has more than 100,000 merchants based in China that sell goods on its platform. Factories act as merchants and ship their products to Temu warehouses in China, which are then delivered directly to consumers in the U.S. and other countries.

Associated Press News
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Amazon is testing a new generative AI shopping assistant

But now we know that Amazon is testing a new feature, powered by generative AI, on its iOS and Android apps that can answer a user’s questions about a specific product in a natural-sounding way. Customers can ask questions like “Would this shirt fit someone who is five foot three inches?” or a more creative one like, “Can you make up a joke with this shirt?” and instantly receive a response that pulls from previous reviews and customer questions. The new rollout was first spotted by the market research firm Marketplace Pulse.

Quartz
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Amazon’s AI-written product reviews aren’t as bad as you think

Juozas Kaziukenas, founder of the e-commerce research firm Marketplace Pulse, pointed out that since Amazon started the AI-generated review summaries last year, the company has tweaked them to highlight terms or features that apparently come up a lot in customer ratings.

“If this grows, that will become yet another part of the Amazon game — getting the right kind of reviews mentioning the right kind of things to make the algorithm summarize it best,” Kaziukenas said.

Washington Post
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Shein Found Amazon’s Weakness

Juozas Kaziukėnas of Marketplace Pulse sketches Amazon’s basic predicament: "Shein is an order of magnitude smaller than Amazon — its gross merchandise value this year, more than $40 billion, is less than 10% of Amazon’s. But most of that $40 billion is in clothing, which Shein is best known for and strongest in. Its supply chain, tuned to introduce thousands of new designs daily while dynamically adjusting which products get manufactured, is uniquely fit for clothing. It is the biggest online-native clothing retailer."

New York Magazine
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