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.
“For TikTok, which is so focused on kick-starting this new shopping platform, it just doesn't want to deal with slow delivery of goods,” said Juozas Kaziukėnas, founder of Marketplace Pulse, an e-commerce research firm.
Though WinIt and Easy Export have signed on as U.S. fulfillment partners, analysis by Marketplace Pulse shows that none of the sellers on Temu’s U.S. marketplace have primary places of business in the U.S. According to Juozas Kaziukėnas, the founder and CEO of the analytics and research firm, Temu’s 5,000-plus U.S. marketplace sellers are actually operated by Chinese companies.
“We’ve only seen Chinese sellers entering [Temu’s marketplace] in the U.S. These two logistics companies also seem to be very focused on Chinese cross-border commerce,” he said. “So if anything, this is a service to Chinese sellers that currently don’t have inventory in the U.S., [or] don’t have a 3PL in the U.S., and this is a path for them to to set it up.”
Juozas Kaziukėnas, the founder and CEO of the e-commerce research firm Marketplace Pulse, compared Jassy’s comments to a couples’ counselor that “effectively said that sellers’ concerns were invalid.”
“We don’t know yet if the FTC will be able to prove that Amazon is at fault but, if anything, Amazon’s communication and dialogue with sellers—that Andy says Amazon has a great relationship with—could be improved.”
But inconsistency has made the platform less compelling for bigger companies. “This is terrible for normal brands because none of this is replicable,” Juozas Kaziukėnas, the CEO of Marketplace Pulse, an independent e-commerce analysis firm told Forbes. “It’s like replicating user-generated content, there’s no formula – but when it works, it works beautifully.”
Juozas Kaziukenas, founder of Marketplace Pulse, an e-commerce intelligence firm, doubts TikTok will ever replace Amazon. “It doesn’t have the broad selection and fulfilment, and shoppers in the West are used to search-based e-commerce,” he said. “But many people spend many hours using TikTok every day, thus, sometimes they will buy things on it.”
“In the U.S. and other countries in the West, shopping apps developed in parallel with apps that provide entertainment or connection like social media. We got used to getting different things from different apps, as opposed to going to one place for it all,” he added.
“Today, social apps like TikTok are trying to figure out shopping before retailers like Amazon figure out social (like through Amazon Inspire). But the status quo of different apps serving different needs remains.”
Amazon aggregators raised over $16 billion in funding over the past couple of years, mostly in 2021 and 2022, according to e-commerce research firm Marketplace Pulse.
Der nächste strategische Schritt von Pinduoduo (PDD), dem Mutterkonzern von Temu, wird in den USA bereits umgesetzt: Dort können lokale Händler*innen und Hersteller seit Mitte März auch selbst Marktplatzpartner von Temu werden – zumindest in der Theorie. Laut Recherchen von Marketplace Pulse gibt es bislang noch keine US-Verkäufer, stattdessen habe Temu mit dem Onboarding von rund 1000 chinesischen Verkäufern begonnen, deren Inventar sich in lokalen Lagern in den USA befände, heißt es.
These efforts haven't been able to grab the attention of online shoppers from other services, according to Juozas Kaziokenas, CEO of e-commerce research firm Marketplace Pulse. He told BI that Amazon's inspiration and social features "remain as underinvested and half-baked features."
Juozas Kaziukėnas, founder of Marketplace Pulse, which tracks e-commerce trends, explained that while brands on other platforms such as Amazon or Etsy gradually build up recognition through ad buys, reviews, and search rankings, this approach is “completely flipped on its head” for TikTok, because users generally don’t search for products but rather discover them in algorithmically selected videos.
This basic difference gave Kaziukėnas a hunch that the most popular products on TikTok Shop would be those peddled by established influencers such as Kim Kardashian or MrBeast. “But that’s not necessarily the case at all,” he said.
Business Insider previously reported that US Amazon sellers were largely eager to try selling on Temu once it was made available to them. Notably, the sellers that are on the new US marketplace so far seem to be Chinese sellers who have warehouses in the US, not American-grown brands, according to Marketplace Pulse. Many of them also sell on Amazon.
“The industry is much more quiet and much more deliberately trying to readjust and find something that works while trying to find some way to survive,” he said. “It’s not that roll-ups don’t work — it’s that the particular strategies of the roll-ups don’t work.”
As such, aggregators are pitching themselves as more niche platforms focused on something beyond acquisition at scale. If a company describes itself as an Amazon-only aggregator, “that phrase will get you deleted from the [investor’s inbox],” said Kaziukėnas.
Juozas Kaziukenas, founder of the e-commerce research firm Marketplace Pulse, says beyond Temu’s marketing savvy, it has advantages that Wish didn’t. Temu can harness PDD’s track record in wrangling large numbers of Chinese vendors and ensuring orders arrive efficiently at your door, he said.
Industry experts expect the first merchants to make use of the new model will likely be Chinese sellers who have warehouse operations in the US. Many of them also sell on Amazon and use Amazon's fulfillment services.
"What they sell is exactly what is being sold on Temu already," Juozas Kaziukėnas, founder and CEO of e-commerce intelligence firm Marketplace Pulse, said.
"Temu seems to have already started the recruitment of sellers in China," he added, citing Chinese media reports about Temu's attendance at recent seller events in China.
“Perhaps the runway that those companies had financially — as well as the patience and willingness by investors to wait even longer — is running out,” said Juozas Kaziukėnas, founder and CEO of Marketplace Pulse, speaking about the aggregator space in general.
These issues were certainly exacerbated by rising interest rates over the last two years. “You cannot operate with expensive debt or expensive capital,” Kaziukėnas said. “If the thing you are using to run these aggregators is expensive capital, it’s near impossible to work. You are just servicing the debt… That is the knife that is killing many of these aggregators”
“This seems to be the year where the few aggregators that are doing well are raising more capital and swallowing the rest,” said Juozas Kaziukenas, the chief executive officer of Marketplace Pulse, which has tracked the industry. “We’re going to go from about 100 aggregators at the peak to a dozen or so that survive.”
At the same time, from 2017 to 2022, the cut of revenue that Amazon takes from these sellers increased from around 40% to around 50%, according to the e-commerce research firm Marketplace Pulse.
Juozas Kaziukėnas, founder and CEO of retail data analytics firm Marketplace Pulse, said he has also noticed TikTok Shop listings appearing in Google’s Shopping tab recently. “Google remains the most popular search engine for shopping,” Kaziukėnas said, although some data suggests Amazon has overtaken the top spot, “And TikTok capturing some of that is not surprising.”
Kaziukėnas said the way products currently sell on TikTok Shop largely revolves around the content created on the platform to promote the products. “However, it’s not an alternative or replacement for search-based shopping,” Kaziukėnas said.
As a well-established search engine with a major advertising component, Kaziukėnas said Google Shopping results also allow people to compare similar styles, features and prices across retailers. “This is not TikTok’s strength,” he added. “TikTok Shop is for impulse buying when you are flipping through videos on the app, and one of them interests you enough for you to buy the product it is featuring.”
Still, Kaziukėnas doesn’t think TikTok Shop will rely on search-based shopping as a major customer acquisition channel, “and thus their ads on Google shopping are not going to be key drivers.”
“TikTok Shop is a shopping experience self-contained inside of the TikTok app and driven by content, rather than search,” he said.
Temu與Shein的app每小時傳通知、不斷出現的優惠倒數、折扣轉盤都讓美國業界驚呆。「我們從沒看過這麼猛的電商，」美國電商專家卡茲克納（Juozas Kaziukėnas）說。
“As low production as it was and as cringey as it might appear to run the same ad five times, it seems to have worked really well in terms of how many people saw it and how many of those people ended up looking for Temu and installing the app,” said Juozas Kaziukėnas, founder and chief executive of Marketplace Pulse, which analyzes e-commerce marketplaces.
“I think every major retailer will be spending more to acquire the same shoppers this year,” said Juozas Kaziukėnas, founder and chief executive of Marketplace Pulse, a business-intelligence firm.