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.
Marketplace pulse founder Jouzas Kaziukènas says that the striking number of searches for things like “Skims Dupes” on Amazon suggests that “just like shoppers on Canal Street, [these] buyers on Amazon are not getting tricked into buying knockoff Skims products – they know and want cheaper lookalike copies.”
Ecommerce businesses that “roll up” independent Amazon merchants raised more than $16bn amid the pandemic-driven boom in consumer spending, according to Marketplace Pulse, which tracks the sector.
Juozas Kaziukenas, founder of Marketplace Pulse, said the aggregators market was in a “cycle of survival”.
“Many of these firms entered the space when the hype cycle was at its peak,” he said. “It’s either figure out a way to survive, or give up and find a way to get out.”
For prospective dupe-makers, the Chinese marketplace Alibaba makes it simple to find and hire manufacturers. Some manufacturers use the same materials and fabrics as big-name brands, said Juozas Kaziukenas, founder of e-commerce analytics firm Marketplace Pulse.
Either way, sellers on shopping platforms like Amazon typically do not have the same overhead costs as retailers with brick-and-mortar locations, allowing them to bring goods to shoppers more cheaply. "They might not be exactly the same, but they're much cheaper," Kaziukenas said.
“This is quite surprising,” said Juozas Kaziukenas of the ecommerce consultancy Marketplace Pulse. “It’s two companies meeting to share their own advantages with each other, which is good for both of them, but perhaps not great for anyone else who’s not Facebook or Amazon.”
According to Juozas Kaziukėnas, founder of e-commerce analyst firm Marketplace Pulse, Shein’s strength is its ability to offer thousands of new items every day. It runs a flexible supply chain that sources from a vast network of Chinese apparel factories and quickly adjusts to customer sentiment. For customers, a key draw is Shein’s low prices.
"It's clear Apple made a deal with Amazon that is not available to other brands," Juozas Kaziukenas, CEO of e-commerce research firm Marketplace Pulse, told Insider. "I can't recall any other brand with the same setup."
Shopping apps and social-media sites tend to be silos that don’t cooperate with one another, according to Juozas Kaziukenas, the founder and chief executive officer of Marketplace Pulse, which monitors online sales. But he says the partnership between Amazon and Facebook shows how their strengths can be complementary.
“Shoppers get more relevant ads and a faster checkout experience, Amazon gets more shopping volume,” he wrote in a post about the agreement.
"A marketplace connects sellers to buyers through a search-based product catalog. Shopify's web app and Shop app before it are as much marketplaces as Amazon," Juozas Kaziukėnas, CEO of e-commerce intelligence firm Marketplace Pulse, told Insider. "The only question: is Shopify driving buyers to use it, spending on marketing, or not? It has all the features in place. What's missing is users."
Then there is e-commerce. Amazon’s platform has long hosted sellers of cheap goods from China. They seldom advertise their provenance. Nonetheless, Juozas Kaziukenas, founder of Marketplace Pulse, an e-commerce research firm, has combed through physical addresses to estimate that many merchants selling on Amazon are based in China. As Shein and Temu surge in popularity, some of those vendors may switch to their platforms. For now, Mr Kaziukenas does not expect the cut-price duo to materially challenge Amazon’s business, which is much bigger, has a broader range of goods for sale and vastly outpaces them on speed of delivery.
The number of views of TikTok videos promoting Amazon Prime Day sales has doubled every year since 2019, to over 400 million for this year’s event in July, according to research firm Marketplace Pulse.
Amazon has more than one million active sellers, and Walmart has roughly 100,000, according to Marketplace Pulse, a third-party firm that collects data on e-commerce marketplaces including Amazon, eBay and Etsy. Amazon and Walmart do not disclose how many active sellers they have.
Over the past 18 months, Walmart Marketplace has doubled in size, according to Marketplace Pulse research, and now boasts 100,000 active sellers, offering around 400 million SKUs: truly the “endless aisle”, the company boasts.
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.
"This is going to be a learning process for TikTok given how quickly it is growing," Juozas Kaziukėnas, CEO of e-commerce intelligence firm Marketplace Pulse, told Insider.
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."