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.
“TikTok doesn’t have the supply yet to be able to offer many great deals, and most of the goods itself are on the lower end of the price spectrum,” said Juozas Kaziukėnas, founder and CEO of Marketplace Pulse. By comparison, big-name, expensive brands like Apple dominated Amazon’s home page during Prime Day, he added.
But the supply chain mimicry and incursion into rival turf go both ways. Just as Amazon is trying to be more like Temu and Shein, the discount platforms are trying to be more like Amazon, said Juozas Kaziukėnas, founder of the market research firm Marketplace Pulse.
If Amazon built an identity based around rapid delivery and convenience, how will the company communicate to shoppers the upside of slower delivery?
“This is not a natural fit for them. And they don’t necessarily have an advantage,” said Kaziukėnas.
Kaziukėnas also pointed to Prime Day, just around the corner, to highlight the many other shopping behaviors Amazon is trying to cater to.
“Shein and Temu are not accidental. This is the one thing these apps are focused on, but for Amazon, this is going to be priority number 17,” he said. "For all of Amazon’s prowess and strength, this is where they are starting from a point of weakness.”
“Temu wants to be more like Amazon, to reduce supply chain risk and offer faster shipping, while Amazon is racing to replicate Temu because it cannot ignore the fact that its low prices trump Amazon's convenience for some shoppers,” said Juozas Kaziukėnas, founder of Marketplace Pulse, an e-commerce consultancy.
TikTok’s ad strategy isn’t exactly subtle, but Juozas Kaziukėnas, an e-commerce expert who founded the business intelligence firm Marketplace Pulse, argues it’s the reason TikTok Shop has been succeeding. “I think platforms like Facebook and Instagram were never willing to overtake users’ feeds with that [shopping] content just to kick-start the platform,” he says.
“I think someone called this the enshittification of social platforms,” says Kaziukėnas, referring to the term coined by journalist Cory Doctorow describing the tendency of online platforms to become worse in quality over time.
In recent years the number of Chinese sellers on Amazon has exploded as the retailer has prioritised independent merchants over goods that it stocks and sells itself. At the start of July, 50.8pc of Amazon’s top sellers were based in China, according to research site Marketplace Pulse, up from 25.8pc at the end of 2018.
“Anyone can see the explosion in the catalogue, tens of thousands of similar or exactly the same products with different brand names, it’s all overwhelming. But it doesn’t seem like it has hurt Amazon,” says Juozas Kaziukėnas of Marketplace Pulse, who points out that rivals such as Walmart are now following the playbook.
“For people who have been shopping on Amazon for decades, to now go back to having items come in two weeks seems like a giant step back,” says Kaziukėnas. Canaves says that while Temu and Shein’s shoppers are largely motivated by price, Amazon’s tend to value speed.
For Juozas Kaziukėnas, founder of e-commerce intelligence firm Marketplace Pulse, its size poses another problem: the places its Western customers live in simply can not take much more stuff.
"Our cities were not built for many more deliveries," he tells the BBC.
That makes emerging economies like India, Mexico and Brazil important. But, Mr Kaziukėnas, suggests, there Amazon does not just need to enter the market but to some extent to make it.
"It's crazy and maybe should not be the case - but that's a conversation for another day," he says.
Amanda Mull points to another priority for Amazon in the years ahead: staving off competition from Chinese rivals like Temu and Shein.
Juozas Kaziukėnas is not so sure - suggesting the new retailers will remain "niche", and it will take something much more fundamental to challenge Amazon's position.
"For as long as going shopping involves going to a search bar - Amazon has nailed that," he says.
Thirty years ago a fledging company spotted emerging trends around internet use and realised how it could upend first retail, then much else besides.
Mr Kaziukėnas says for that to happen again will take a similar leap of imagination, perhaps around AI.
"The only threat to Amazon is something that doesn't look like Amazon," he says.
“The only way Amazon could match prices was to replicate the supply-chain advantage,” said Juozas Kaziukėnas, founder of market research firm Marketplace Pulse.
Juozas Kaziukenas, CEO at e-commerce data site Marketplace Pulse, said in the short-term not much will change because traditionally Amazon subsections haven’t been as popular as regular Prime offerings. He noted Amazon Luxury, which separates out luxury brands but which most people haven’t heard of.
“Everything is optimized for Prime, and this is not Prime,” he said. “This is very slow delivery relative to Prime. So it's not going to be a main shopping experience to consumers, and it's not necessarily going to be a big part of Amazon.”
Longer term, though he said American sellers will have to continue to differentiate themselves from Chinese competitors.
“The writing has been on the wall for a long time,” Kaziukenas said. “If you're selling generic goods, that a seller from China can sell as well and compete on price, your days are numbered.”
According to data from e-commerce analysis firm Marketplace Pulse, new Chinese sellers have spiked in recent months. In April 2023, new Chinese sellers represented just 1.8% of all new sellers on Walmart Marketplace. By October 2023, that figure reached 24%, and by April 2024, it hit 73.8%, a record high.
It's inevitable that America's largest retailer would embrace companies in China that want to sell directly to Americans, said Juozas Kaziukėnas, Marketplace Pulse’s CEO.
"That’s [what] Amazon looks like, that’s the direction Walmart is going, and that’s how most other major marketplaces look like. The only choice is when you turn on Chinese sellers. There is no massive pool of international sellers elsewhere.”
Target Plus has only a tiny fraction of the revenue and sellers of other third-party marketplaces. Unlike Amazon, Walmart, eBay and others, Target allows brands to join by invitation only. It has more than 1,200 sellers, according to Target. Amazon counts about 2 million sellers and Walmart has about 135,000 sellers, according to estimates by Marketplace Pulse, a e-commerce research tracker.
Meanwhile, Amazon’s latest annual report cites a “significant” dependence on Chinese sellers, estimated by Marketplace Pulse to account for roughly half of all third-party gross merchandise value and 25% to 30% of total e-commerce on the platform. For all the chatter about Temu in the investor and operator zeitgeist, the revenue generated from Chinese-owned businesses on Amazon with names like DOKOTOO and the aforementioned NUTSAAKK is orders of magnitude bigger.
“Memberships build loyalty,” Juozas Kaziukėnas, founder of Marketplace Pulses, said in an email. “While fast shipping without a membership is more flexible for shoppers, Walmart realized that that doesn’t build loyalty.”
There’s also room in the subscription wars for customers who want both a Walmart+ and Amazon Prime subscription.
“It is likely that many Amazon Prime members have a Walmart+ membership, and as Walmart continues to push the program, more will do in the future,” Marketplace Pulse’s Kaziukėnas said. That’s because while Walmart rules grocery retail, including store pick up and delivery, Amazon dominates when it comes to its vast selection of online goods and ultra-fast delivery, he said. “This is not a zero-sum game — both programs can co-exist.”
“Temu is not a marketplace at all. It's much closer to a retailer business than it's closer to an Amazon or eBay business,” said Juozas Kaziukėnas, founder of Marketplace Pulse, an e-commerce research firm.
Juozas Kaziukėnas, the CEO of an e-commerce analysis firm called Marketplace Pulse, told Forbes in a text message that Ho’s experience could be a harbinger of an AI-fueled near future.
“Using top videos on TikTok as the jumping off point, spammers will modify them or create new ones in hopes to replicate at least some of their popularity,” he wrote. “We are all about to have our friends see ‘ourselves’ promoting goods we had no part in.”
“This is not an Amazon versus Walmart battle, but rather an online grocery versus general merchandise shopping spending comparison,” Juozas Kaziukėnas, founder of Marketplace Pulses, said in an email. “Given that people tend to regularly spend on grocery while general shopping is split between different retailers, it’s not surprising that a Walmart+ member might do most of their grocery shopping on Walmart.”
"Temu is a threat to Amazon at certain price points, certain categories and for certain people," Juozas Kaziukenas, founder and chief executive of e-commerce intelligence firm Marketplace Pulse, told Investor's Business Daily. "We don't yet know how big that is."
Shipping directly from China to customers in other countries means delivery can take longer, compared with Amazon and other companies with local logistics operations. The Temu shopping site says shipping can take six to 22 days. On the other hand, "Temu launched in 50 countries in a year, which wouldn't be physically possible if you had to build warehouses and store products locally," Kaziukenas of Marketplace Pulse told IBD.
Juozas Kaziukėnas, founder of e-commerce intelligence firm Marketplace Pulse, calls the strategy a “shock-imposed buy”: When the price of something is so unbelievably low that customers have no choice but to hit “purchase.”
“For long-term success, TikTok will inevitably need those higher priced items,” said Juozas Kaziukėnas, founder and CEO of Marketplace Pulse. “The market is so much bigger than selling cheap knockoffs.”
“I get why they would not show results for banned topics in China, but not showing results for U.S. topics is odd,” Juozas Kaziukėnas, the CEO of Marketplace Pulse, an independent e-commerce analysis firm, told Forbes. “Temu seems to be trying to preemptively avoid embarrassment or bad PR, but no other retailer approaches the same way.”
This, according to the e-commerce analyst and Marketplace Pulse founder Juozas Kaziukėnas, is among the reasons that ultra-cheap retailers that ship to the U.S. from overseas have found such enthusiastic audiences. “During uncertain economic times,” he told me, “price tends to bubble up to become the most important variable” in how even greater numbers of people make purchase decisions.
Confounding all of this is the reality that price and quality are not as closely tied to each other as they once were. Kaziukėnas challenged a common assumption that the novelty of stores like Temu and Shein will have to wear off eventually: Not everything they sell is as off-putting or low quality in person as you might think. Much of it, according to Kaziukėnas, is identical to what American brands and retailers sell—it is, after all, coming from existing manufacturers—but at a much lower price. Temu and Shein were designed to drive overhead down to a minimum: They’ve bet that lots of people are willing to trade instant shipping and robust customer service for lower prices, and they’ve largely been right. American retailers’ emphasis on speed and variety requires more overhead because they’ve built systems with more steps between manufacturers and buyers. “Amazon and eBay would happily replicate Temu’s ship-from-China model if they hadn’t spent decades optimizing for a different kind of experience,” Kaziukėnas said.
When you look at the data, lots of people who say they hate this phenomenon of cheap, high-volume consumption tend to be enthusiastic participants in it. Kaziukėnas pointed to a recent report published by The New Consumer and the venture-capital firm Coefficient Capital that found that Shein shoppers are considerably more likely to express concern about the environment and sustainability than shoppers overall. “There is a disconnect between what we tell ourselves, what we tell others, and how we behave,” Kaziukėnas said.