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.
Last year, nearly 60 percent of units sold on Amazon came from third-party sellers rather than from Amazon itself. Want to set up a booth? There’s a nominal monthly fee to reserve the space. From there, though, the charges add up quickly, according to a report from the ecommerce-intelligence firm Marketplace Pulse.
Marketplace Pulse reported in February that Amazon sellers are paying as much as 50% of their revenue to Amazon in fees, a point that is echoed in the FTC's suit.
Amazon took roughly 50% of outside sellers' revenue through fees in 2022, up from about 35% in 2016, according to a Marketplace Pulse study.
Amazon charges marketplace businesses a sales commission of something like 15 percent of the total price of a product. (Amazon’s commission varies by the type of product.) But because of various other fees that the government says aren’t really optional, the company typically keeps for itself more than 50 percent of the total product price, according to estimates by e-commerce research firm Marketplace Pulse.
Shipping goods by air directly from China is a strategy that helps the e-tailer avoid unsold inventory piling up in warehouses, according to Juozas Kaziukenas, founder of e-commerce analytics firm Marketplace Pulse.
Shein recently opened a marketplace for U.S. customers, creating a channel for independent merchants to sell products through its site. Thousands of Amazon sellers have joined the new platform, including dozens that are based in the U.S., according to research firm Marketplace Pulse.
Juozas Kaziukėnas, CEO of e-commerce intelligence firm Marketplace Pulse, said TikTok Shop's new app store seems most similar to Amazon's app store in that its services enable functions like data syncing and order shipping without changing the way a store functions or looks.
"Those apps help you manage the business," which he said is "especially key for sellers that sell across many channels." He said highlighting third-party software partners could be a way to entice sellers to start using TikTok Shop.
"When you build a marketplace like TikTok did, you need partners that will be a source of sellers because sellers joining marketplaces that don't integrate with apps they already use is a big roadblock," he said. "It also saves marketplaces from building a lot of tech in its own seller dashboard because it can instead stream that data to third-party apps that have built it already."
The interest was especially intense during the Corona period against the background of the sharp jump in online consumerism. According to the research company Marketplace Pulse, which specializes in retail consumerism, this market today includes 93 companies, of which 55 have announced fundraising rounds, and of which 31 have raised at least $100 million. In total, these companies have raised $16.2 billion in the last three years, much of it in debt from giants such as BlackRock, Goldman Sachs and Bain Capital. At the peak in 2021, the companies raised a total of $12 billion.
Marketplace Pulse, an e-commerce research group, said the aggregators had raised more than $16 billion in capital over the past four years, much of it in 2021 and 2022 as online shopping boomed during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Under the deal announced Wednesday, Shopify Payments will process the payments through the company’s checkout service. Previously, Shopify had warned merchants who used Buy with Prime that the integration violated Shopify’s terms of service, and prevented it from protecting against fraud, according to Marketplace Pulse, which tracks online sellers.
Juozas Kaziukenas, founder and chief executive officer of Marketplace Pulse, which monitors online sales, says Amazon has been making it harder and harder in recent years for merchants to qualify for Seller Fulfilled Prime. The upshot: “Most sellers use Fulfillment By Amazon instead.”
PDD is building Temu’s customer base with big spending on advertising — it bought a slot during the Super Bowl — and by doling out vouchers to shoppers who refer friends. The key question, said Juozas Kaziukenas, founder of research firm Marketplace Pulse, is whether those customers return.
“Amazon has spent the last two decades training consumers that they should expect very fast delivery and infinite selection,” says Juozas Kaziukėnas, of research firm Marketplace Pulse. “But obviously they can never be as cheap as what Temu is.”
These fees are optional, but most merchants consider them necessary costs of doing business. Amazon’s average cut of each sale on its marketplace has increased in recent years, surpassing 50% in 2022, according to a study by Marketplace Pulse, up from 35% in 2016.
Juozas Kaziukėnas, CEO of e-commerce intelligence firm Marketplace Pulse, said he hasn't seen the same volume of complaints from sellers on eBay and Etsy as he has on Amazon. But, he said that despite the headaches, having detailed information about each seller on Amazon is likely to pay off for both shoppers and the company.
"It's probably going to be beneficial — even for Amazon itself — to know that here's all the sellers we have, and we actually know that the deals they have provided to us, or that the deals we have are actually up to date," he said.
But entering the retail industry itself might be one of the only ways for TikTok to convince more brands to join TikTok Shop, which has yet to gain significant traction in the U.S. Once companies see that consumers are willing to make purchases through the platform, they may be more willing to invest in it, said Juozas Kaziukėnas, founder of the e-commerce intelligence firm Marketplace Pulse.
“Amazon was first a retailer, then a marketplace. Shein was first a retailer, then a marketplace,” said Kaziukenas. “TikTok too will first be a retailer, then a marketplace?”
That likely makes it the fastest retailer to go from zero to scale, said Juozas Kaziukėnas, who runs e-commerce research firm Marketplace Pulse. For comparison, Wish and Shein both took about three years to cross 50 million downloads.
“They’re lighting money on fire.” Juozas Kaziukėnas of e-commerce research firm Marketplace Pulse. “As a new entrant, Temu is willing to do things other retailers aren’t,” said Kaziukėnas. Most of its competitors tend to be far “quieter,” he said.
“It’s a slow start, it’s a small start. And I think it will be a while to see what it goes up into becoming,” Juozas Kaziukėnas, founder and CEO of Marketplace Pulse said. He added that reports of TikTok facing a similar issue with U.S. merchants is testimony that Shein will struggle to onboard sellers in the US.
"You can imagine a scenario where a customer is getting their keys to drive to a dollar store and Temu throws off a notification in the app, they buy something immediately, and then they're like: 'Okay, I've spent my money on that, I'm not gonna go to a dollar store,'" Juozas Kaziukėnas, CEO of e-commerce intelligence company Marketplace Pulse, told Insider.
Juozas Kaziukėnas, who runs the research firm Marketplace Pulse, describes Temu as emblematic of a long-coming change in e-commerce. “‘Made in China’ cut out domestic manufacturing,” he writes. “‘Sold by China’ cut out domestic sellers. ‘Marketed by China’ is cutting out domestic retailers.”