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.
A $9.48 canister of Sabre “max police strength” pepper spray shot up to the top-selling rank in Amazon’s sports and outdoors category Monday morning, supplanting normal best-sellers such as shorts and t-shirts, according to Marketplace Pulse, which monitors the site. A neck gaiter, which can cover the nose and mouth and became popular during the pandemic, is No. 2.
“It’s not well defined on Amazon’s part, there’s no clear definition of what a pricing ceiling is or how it gets calculated,” says Juozas Kaziukenas of Marketplace Pulse, who’d also encountered the $1,000 collectible Bowflex dumbbells.
“If there’s very high demand and low supply, that item will be sold one way or another,” says Kaziukenas. “Usually by sellers finding cracks in the algorithm.”
According to data sourced from US-based analyst Marketplace Pulse, 85% of the 200,000 sellers that were active on Amazon on March 20 -- five days before the lockdown to stop the spread of the Covid-19 virus outbreak was imposed -- have once again become active.
Higher online sales traffic at companies like Walmart and Target can be traced in part to "customers looking for faster delivery," said Juozas Kaziukenas, CEO of e-commerce consultancy Marketplace Pulse, in an interview.
"People started to do delivery comparison because the things they wanted from Amazon were now taking a month, which is the opposite of the promise that Amazon has built over the last decade," he said.
According to estimates by Marketplace Pulse, an e-commerce research firm, a third of the top Amazon sellers — those doing more than $1 million in annual U.S. sales — are based in China, bidding abroad for algorithmic supremacy and relying on Amazon to handle nearly everything after their products reach the U.S. In calmer times, this globe-spanning complexity is mostly invisible to the customer, who experiences a familiar, quick transaction and, in many cases, opens an Amazon-branded box, shipped from an Amazon facility, maybe even delivered by an Amazon truck.
Amazon shoppers are fed up with those third-party sellers on the site at levels rarely, if ever, seen, according to data culled by Juozas Kaziukenas, chief executive of e-commerce research firm Marketplace Pulse. Shoppers, who can register opinions about the service received from third-party merchants as negative, neutral or positive, are clicking “negative” at the highest levels Kaziukenas has ever recorded.
“How much it broke and how quickly it broke is much larger than people realize,” he said.
More than 11 percent of reviews left for sellers in the past 30 days are negative. That’s nearly twice the level of frustration vented by shoppers regarding Amazon’s third-party sellers during the holidays, when customer anxieties spike over not getting presents on time, Kaziukenas said.
Kaziukenas has seen that sort of frustration mount. Of the 913,000 seller reviews left worldwide in the 30 days that ended May 18, shoppers clicked “negative” 11 percent of the time, up from 6 percent of the 350,000 reviews a year earlier. Even during the holiday season, negative reviews rarely top 7 percent, according to Kaziukenas’s data.
The company started informing third-party sellers on Saturday that it would no longer limit new shipments of nonessential goods by quantity. Previously, Amazon had placed a “Limited Restock” tag on products shipped to Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) warehouses, but as of this weekend, the label had been removed, meaning sellers can send in as much inventory as they want, said Juozas Kaziukenas, who runs the e-commerce market research firm Marketplace Pulse.
Next-day delivery is now starting to come back online for select cities in the U.S., Kaziukenas said, signaling that delivery times appear to be improving. However, until Amazon can restore its normally speedy one- and two-day shipping options for Prime subscribers, warehouses won’t be fully recovered, he added.
“Amazon has been in a race against the clock to restore fast shipping as without it it sent customers to look elsewhere,” Kaziukenas said. “It’s not done yet, but they appear past the April multi-week-long deliveries, at least for the most popular items.”
Long delivery times were beginning to erode Amazon’s stellar brand reputation among consumers, said Juozas Kaziukenas, founder of the New York research firm Marketplace Pulse that monitors the site. Shoppers left 800,000 negative reviews on Amazon’s shopping site in April, double the number in the same month a year ago, with much of the increase attributable to longer delivery times, he said.
“Amazon is known for great selection, low prices and fast shipping,” Kaziukenas said. “These all broke during the pandemic. Selection was not always there, prices were not lowest because Amazon sold out, and fast shipping was gone.”
Amazon didn't provide details on its shipping times, but Juozas Kaziukenas, founder of the Marketplace Pulse research site, said two-day and one-day shipping is still spotty throughout the US and Amazon appears to be a long way from nationwide two-day shipping. However, he said an order he placed on Saturday in New York City arrived the next day, a positive sign that faster shipping times, including for nonessential items, are coming back. Kaziukenas earlier reported the improved delivery times.
Kaziukenas found other signs that Amazon's operations were stabilizing. He said the company is again accepting new daily deals and coupons, pointing to increased capacity for nonessential goods. These features were temporarily restricted during the pandemic as Amazon attempted to curb nonessential purchases on its site so it could manage all the incoming orders.
"Very clearly, they're silently opening things up," he said.
Wie das E-Commerce-Portal marketplacepulse.com in einem Beitrag offenbart, stammen nach aktuellem Stand etwa 29 Prozent der Top-Verkäufer in den vier wichtigsten Kernmärkten des US-Riesen Amazon (nämlich die USA, Deutschland, UK sowie Japan) aus China. Im Vergleich zum Januar ist dieser Wert zurückgegangen – vor vier Monaten habe er demnach noch bei 35 Prozent gelegen. „Der Prozentsatz entspricht dem Durchschnittswert der vier Marktplätze, gemäß der Marketplace Pulse-Analysen von fast 90 % der Top-Verkäufer, deren Geschäftsadressen zuverlässig ermittelt werden konnten“, schreiben die Spezialisten.
