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.
“It’s obvious that Amazon thinks the risks have skyrocketed,” said Joe Kaziukenas, founder of Marketplace Pulse, which tracks data on e-commerce platforms.
“Sellers are worried about their cash flow, and Amazon lending was one of the ways to support that. And now as we’ve seen in some cases, it’s gone,” Kaziukenas said.
When looking at the top search terms on Amazon.com, the majority of the top 50 fall in the household products/personal care categories, such as toilet paper, hand sanitizer and Clorox wipes, according to data from Marketplace Pulse, a company that tracks data on marketplaces. Toilet paper is the No. 1 search term the week of March 8–14, up from No. 37 the week of Feb. 23-29. “Toilet paper bulk” is No. 4 during the week of March 8 week, up from 2,647 during the week of Feb. 23.
“Face masks and hand sanitizers are the number one and number two most searched terms on Amazon. That's attracting many sellers who are pulling every trick they can think of to get into search results,” says Juozas Kaziukėnas, founder of the ecommerce data firm Marketplace Pulse, who first alerted WIRED to the face mask listings.
“Even deliveries from Amazon Prime are not being delivered anywhere close to one or two days because not only is Amazon overwhelmed, but UPS, FedEx and all the last-mile delivery companies also are overwhelmed,” said Juozas Kaziukenas, founder of the research firm Marketplace Pulse.
“The whole supply chain in the country is being pushed to the limit because no one was expecting such an explosion of demand in the first quarter, because it never happens,” Kaziukenas said.
FBA also enables sellers to take advantage of Amazon’s two-day Prime shipping, making it a useful service for sellers. Of the top 10,000 sellers on Amazon’s marketplace, 87% of them use FBA services, while 13% ship products on their own, according to research firm Marketplace Pulse.
"Shoppers will notice that some items are out of stock or higher priced," Juozas Kaziukenas told Business Insider. "This should become more common as the April 5 date approaches."
“As more people stay at home to work, with kids to take care of, having groceries delivered becomes a life saver,” said Juozas Kaziukenas, founder of e-commerce researcher Marketplace Pulse. “Walmart is uniquely positioned to enable that.”
But it’s this reactive approach that some sellers say is precisely the problem in the ever-growing Amazon Marketplace, which adds 2,200 new sellers daily, according to Marketplace Pulse. These new ranks have helped Amazon’s product catalog balloon to over 500 million items, by some estimates—and Amazon previously told Adweek it has no plans to throttle the spigot as it seeks to offer the best prices, selection and convenience.
Some of the top product searches on Amazon.com Inc. last week were for hand sanitizer and other products to prevent the spread of the virus, but webcams and monitors are shooting up the rankings now, according to analysis by Marketplace Pulse.
According to e-commerce intelligence firm Marketplace Pulse, sellers on Amazon sold $200 billion worth of products in 2019, compared with Amazon's own retail sales of $135 billion that year, for a total gross merchandise volume of $335 billion.
Third-party sellers have become the backbone of the company, with the percentage of physical gross merchandise sold by independent third-party merchants on Amazon's site growing from 3% in 1999 to 60% in 2019, said Juozas Kaziukenas, founder of Marketplace Pulse, in an interview.
If sellers find themselves out of stock, it will impact the bottom line for Amazon as a whole, Kaziukenas said. "They don't have as much experience, time or capital available to them to be able to all of the sudden shift their supply chain somewhere else," he said.
And when Chinese factories do fully resume production, they will focus on their largest clients first, such as Walmart Inc. in first-tier markets such as the U.S., creating more uncertainty for sellers that sell smaller volumes. "There is so much backlog in production they are going to have a hard time getting their products made for them," Kaziukenas said.
