We have been analyzing Amazon through the sellers’ angle for a while now, but have been working on expanding the scope to additional fields. A very interesting metric for us is what sort of brands are on sale on Amazon, how many sellers sell them and how brands grow and shrink on the marketplace.
Traditionally top sellers on Amazon got there by sourcing products from thousands of manufacturers. For example seller Avalanche Brands sells products from over 7,000 brands. This has resulted in brands like Fisher-Price to have over 30,000 products on the site, sold by close to 8,000 different sellers, Amazon itself included. There are even bigger brands including Disney, Mattel, Hasbro and Marvel sold by over 10,000 sellers.
While Amazon offers tools for brands to manage their presence - even if they are not selling any products themselves - few of the brands ever did so successfully. Policing MAP (Minimum Advertised Price) or making sure products have the right pictures is still a challenge many manufacturers have been struggling for years. The Amazon products catalog is mostly created and edited by sellers, which over the years has resulted in an endless database of incomplete and erroneous listings. Many of the brands are misspelled, incorrect or are duplicates in some variation.
| Percent of Brands | Sellers per Brand |
|---|---|
| 42.8% | 1 |
| 12.1% | 2 |
| 6.4% | 3 |
| 4.3% | 4 |
| 3.2% | 5 |
| 2.6% | 6 |
| 2.1% | 7 |
| 1.8% | 8 |
| 1.5% | 9 |
| 1.3% | 10 |
| 21.9% | 10+ |
A lot of the brands offered by a single seller or two are misspelled or mistaken brands. Of the 1,357,529 total brands on Amazon, at least a half could be discarded as duplicates. We will come back to this topic in future articles with our work on cleaning up the brands list.
Because of this and growing competition, the marketplace has been shifting towards brands selling their own products and sellers building private label products, introducing many more sellers with less than a handful of brands. Sellers realized that being competitive selling popular products from Disney or Hasbro is becoming too hard, and manufacturers realized that the best way to control their brand is to be the ones to sell it online.
Each seller on average has 68 brands. However this average number is meaningless as it hides the distribution - most sellers have 10 or less brands. In the table below we counted sellers by how many brands they have on offer.
| Brands per Seller | Percent of Sellers |
|---|---|
| 1 | 27.4% |
| 2 | 11.4% |
| 3 | 6.4% |
| 4 | 4.2% |
| 5 | 3.0% |
| 6 | 2.4% |
| 7 | 1.9% |
| 8 | 1.6% |
| 9 | 1.4% |
| 10 | 1.3% |
| 10+ | 39.1% |
This is an introduction to the upcoming research on brands. It’s already obvious that there are some big brands sold by thousands of sellers, but the interesting action is happening with the smaller brands - most of them brand new private label brands offered by up-and-coming sellers.
