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, CNBC, Yahoo Finance, and The Information.
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.
Joe Kaziukenas, CEO of the e-commerce research firm Marketplace Pulse, said the most likely scenario is that a customer returned the item to Amazon, and then an employee somehow marked it as new and inserted it back into the company’s normal pool of inventory.
“Amazon has been critiqued for not making full use of the Whole Foods acquisition, and this is about to change that,” said Juozas Kaziukenas, founder of New York eCommerce research firm Marketplace Pulse. “Having local stores act as two-hour delivery hubs is exactly why Amazon acquired the company.”
I find myself thinking of a conversation I had toward the beginning of the year with Juozas Kaziukenas, founder of Marketplace Pulse, a research company. “If the chaos continues, I don’t know how long a consumer will be willing to put up with it,” he said. “They are a marketplace of trust, and if you cannot trust it, the whole premise of Amazon completely evaporates.”
Juozas “Joe” Kaziukenas, founder of Marketplace Pulse, said keeping Target Plus by invitation only is initially a wise approach for Target, even though it will keep it from growing to the size of other marketplaces.
“They have not been in the business of marketplaces for long,” he said. “Opening their doors on day one to everything that is out there has the risk of ruining the customer experience on Target. The next thing you know, it would be a completely uncontrollable catalog of randomness.”
Still, he said, he’s a bit confused about why Target decided to build a marketplace since most of its online growth is coming from same-store delivery and store pickup, which do not include marketplace items.
“I think it’s going to be challenging for Target to make this marketplace grow if they can’t figure out how to integrate it into the rest of the Target experience,” he said.
“Many companies have launched by taking a category of eBay and building a marketplace around it,” said Juozas Kaziukenas, the CEO of retail data analytics firm Marketplace Pulse.
“EBay’s problem remains that it’s a general platform,” Kaziukenas said. “It’s a solution for everything and yet, a solution for nothing.”
More than 500 million products are available on Amazon at any given time, according to estimates by e-commerce research firm Marketplace Pulse. That’s because Amazon isn’t just a retailer, it’s a marketplace that has invited more than 2.5 million sellers to hawk those wares, by Marketplace Pulse’s measure. Creating a digital storefront on Amazon requires little more than a driver’s license and a bank statement.
Ínstead, sellers typically buy ads for their more expensive products or ones they have just launched to get the product in front of more shoppers and increase the likelihood of a sale, said Juozas Kaziukenas, the founder of Marketplace Pulse, a market research firm.
Third-party sellers account for over half of Amazon’s sales. The company doesn’t disclose how many sellers on its platform are from China. In an online post in Chinese, the company claims it has helped over “several hundred thousand Chinese sellers” to sell globally. Thirty-six percent of the active sellers on Amazon U.S. are from China, according to Marketplace Pulse research.
The Amazon Marketplace is home to a collection of sellers that list an infinite number of derivatives and varieties of a basic product, using algorithms to create combinations in the hopes that one of them will attract a lone buyer looking for an obscure niche item. Juozas Kaziukėnas, founder of Marketplace Pulse, a company that analyzes e-commerce, told Cheddar that oftentimes, these sellers do not carry any inventory at all, instead creating the products only when they're ordered. The practice is common for items like mugs, T-shirts, PopSockets, and anything else printable.
"Since these products, in reality, do not exist. There can be an infinite amount of them," said Kaziukėnas.
"There's virtually no cost in hosting a product on Amazon," said Kaziukėnas. "It costs the same whether you have one product or 100 million products."
Kaziukėnas says the problem is unlikely to go away any time soon ー much to Amazon's chagrin. While Amazon also deploys its own algorithm designed to filter offensive images, it too lacks the contextual awareness needed to catch a product like that before it reaches the Marketplace. "These products were for sale on Amazon for months before anyone noticed, so it took an actual expert in the field, the Auschwitz Twitter account, to actually know the issue and point it out to Amazon," said Kaziukėnas.
"As much as Amazon is to blame, they're also [faced] with policing hundreds of millions of products created on Amazon every day," said Kaziukėnas. "These issues are inevitably going to happen again."
Juozas Kaziukėnas, CEO of research firm Marketplace Pulse, said that Amazon’s livestream has few bells and whistles to encourage viewers to watch the livestream for more than a few seconds. The livestream mostly features Amazon’s own hosts demoing products, and does not feature influencers from other popular platforms like YouTube or Instagram, or celebrities.
“Amazon has tens of thousands of deals running at any given point at time, and it can be heard to find them,” Kaziukėnas said. “I think it would be much more impactful if Amazon’s livestream was available on YouTube, or on some TV channels, or on Amazon Prime video channels.”
