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.
This isn’t the first time Amazon merchants have miss-categorized products to fool the algorithms. During the pandemic, some merchants put packs of face masks in the book and video game categories to circumvent Amazon’s product-safety rules regarding the coronavirus, said Juozas Kaziukenas, founder and CEO of Marketplace Pulse, which monitors online sales.
Amazon’s focus has shifted from “trying to find ways to delight consumers with great recommendations, personalization and discovery to building better advertising technology,” says industry analyst Juozas Kaziukenas of research firm Marketplace Pulse, who has written about how everything on Amazon is becoming an ad.
“Consumers can either ignore ads or assume that the advertised product is good enough,” said Kaziukenas. “Part of the reason why those ads on Amazon and Google work so well is because it’s near impossible for them to perfectly determine the best search results.”
“The craze has basically evaporated,” said Juozas Kaziukėnas, founder of e-commerce data firm Marketplace Pulse. “Now it’s up to them [aggregators] to figure out how to do the thing they promised to do. It’s a proving ground.”
Juozas Kaziukėnas, founder and CEO of Marketplace Pulse said the rumored layoffs will probably hasten Amazon’s transformation from a retailer to a marketplace business. “Amazon’s layoffs appear to include retail folks. I assume most of those are Amazon’s first-party retail people, not the marketplace teams… The marketplace is more profitable, takes less people to run and has been growing in sales mix percent consistently over the years — it was 58% of all sold units on Amazon in Q3,” said Kaziukėnas.
Juozas Kaziukėnas, founder of the e-commerce-intelligence firm Marketplace Pulse, argued it won’t be easy for Temu or other Chinese platforms to lure a large cohort of sellers away from Amazon, even if they’re offering a better deal. Amazon’s marketplace is simply too dominant, particularly in the U.S.
“When a seller makes the decision about where to sell or where not to sell, a lot of that is based on how big the opportunity is,” Kaziukėnas explained.
“I believe it’s driven almost exclusively by ads,” says Juozas Kaziukėnas, who founded the e-commerce analyst firm Marketplace Pulse, “because I’m seeing relatively no mentions of Temu on social media. That makes me believe that there’s very little organic recognition of the brand yet.”
“This model of relying on ads to drive every transaction does have an expiration date, and that’s what unfortunately caused the demise of Wish,” says Kaziukėnas. At one point, ads will become too expensive and too inefficient to justify the costs.
“You see some small attempts to do these sorts of experiments, but if you zoom out and look at what has actually changed over the last 10 years? Not that much. Amazon looks exactly the same,” says Kaziukėnas. “Perhaps [it] suggests that the West is just a much more established environment, economically and also technologically, so it’s unlikely to see these kinds of massive disruptions as you saw in China.”
Global sales on Marketplace have almost doubled in two years to $610 billion (£545 billion) — almost two-thirds of that made by third-party sellers, according to the researcher Marketplace Pulse.
Not everyone is convinced that the Amazon sale was a flop. Even if the 48-hour event failed to exceed Prime Day sales, Amazon still likely saw more sales on Tuesday and Wednesday than it would on a typical day, said Juozas Kaziukenas, founder of research firm Marketplace Pulse.
“I think it did fine for what Amazon was trying to do, which was to reduce the amount of products they have in their warehouses,” Kaziukenas said.
According to data from Marketplace Pulse, investors poured in more than $12bn into roll-up companies last year.
“If 2021 was the year to launch an aggregator and attract what looked like unlimited capital, 2022 is the year of survival,” said Juozas Kaziukenas, analyst with ecommerce research company Marketplace Pulse. “The market is still active, but I think it will be a long slump of quietness before some of those find the winning formula.”
“Pinduoduo’s Temu looks like Shein the most. It is also built on manufacturers in China, and doesn’t have domestic sellers in the US or Europe,” said Juozas Kaziukėnas, founder and CEO of Marketplace Pulse told Modern Retail in an emailed response.
"It's up to Google to experiment and expand the shopping experiences that consumers discover on Google," said Juozas Kaziukenas, founder of research firm MarketplacePulse.com. "I'm sure Google will continue to experiment to improve conversion rates for retailers and brands. Their position as the No. 1 search engine allows them to just keep at it because people will keep coming back."
“Alibaba appears to be trying to turn its B2B platform into a worldwide catalog of manufacturers,” Juozas Kaziukenas, founder of New York-based e-commerce intelligence firm Marketplace Pulse, told Rest of World. According to Kaziukenas, the company has been the most successful at this in Pakistan, Vietnam, and previously, India.
Juozas Kaziukėnas, founder of Marketplace Pulse, which originally spotted Shopify’s message about Buy with Amazon, explained that Shopify wants to ensure it doesn’t lose transactional fees to Amazon.
“Shopify is playing defensive by trying to slow down Buy with Prime’s growth. Not only would Shopify be losing transactional fees for orders placed with it, it wants Shop Pay [its own checkout service] to be the front and center quick-checkout solution,” he pointed out.
“Shopify was not a consumer-facing brand for a decade, but they are quickly changing that with the Shop app, Shop Cash rewards, Shop Pay, and more,” Kaziukėnas said. “Shopify wants shoppers to think of Shopify when shopping on their stores, not Amazon.”
The e-commerce platform is warning merchants who try to install Amazon’s “Buy With Prime” button on their storefront that it violates Shopify’s terms of service, and is also raising the specter of security risks, according to research firm Marketplace Pulse.
Last September, Pharmapacks was the No. 1 Amazon seller in the U.S., though it now ranks fifth among the site’s top sellers nationwide, according to research firm Marketplace Pulse.
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.