Articles

Jun 1, 2017

Brands Shouldn't Fear Amazon, The Threat Is Millions of Marketplace Sellers

On Wednesday KPCB partner Mary Meeker released annual Internet Trends 2017 report. Her findings were that Amazon sells more batteries than brands like Duracell and Energizer, owning more than 30 percent of the US market. Duracell, a company incorporated 93 years ago in 1924, found themselves outsold by unrecognizable Amazon Basics. The conversation of Amazon destroying brands is missing one key area, though. It is missing the impact of marketplace sellers.

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May 9, 2017

Private Label and the Future of Marketplaces

The unique idea powering marketplaces is the hiding of complexity in picking a retailer. Instead of a customer spending time to find the best deal, and the best shipping option, a marketplace like Amazon suggest the best one. But we think this can be taken even further - a marketplace which hides the complexity of picking a product.

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May 3, 2017

Amazon Is Good at Building Generic Products, Not Brands

Amazon has so far done really well by launching generic products - products which do not depend on a brand. Batteries, cables, other electronics are a good examples of this. But Amazon hasn't yet figured out how to build brands. Sales of Lark & Ro apparel products are growing, but likely a lot of this is driven by search optimization and Amazon prioritizing own products.

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Apr 25, 2017

Un-Amazon-Able Is the Only Way to Compete with Amazon

At least 55 cents of every new dollar spent in US e-commerce is on Amazon, and analysts estimate that by 2021 Amazon will account for more than 50% of all US e-commerce spending. We think e-commerce business which fail to realize where the market is heading are going to waste a lot of resources trying to compete in a market they cannot win. Un-Amazon-Able are the only brands and e-commerce businesses that will be able to survive Amazon's growing e-commerce presence.

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Apr 20, 2017

Why Amazon Is Not Acquiring Top Performing Marketplace Sellers

Amazon has unique and unrivaled visibility into the performance of hundreds of thousands of products and brands. Just like Netflix is investing into TV shows based on data they collect, Amazon is starting to build brands based on data. But Amazon could also avoid doing most of the work, and instead invest into the brands already performing well.

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Apr 4, 2017

Becoming a Top Amazon Marketplace Seller Takes Years

This time we looked at how many of the top Amazon sellers have joined in the past 365 days. It is an interesting number to look at because as we found, it shows that it takes a while to become a top seller. We found that just 5.6% of top 10,000 sellers joined during the past 365 days.

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Feb 15, 2017

Top Private Label Brands on Amazon, Most Are Selling Electronics

We are continuing to research brands - recently we were able to build a reliable way to detect private label brands. Thus this time we are sharing top 25 brands based on reviews who enjoy the luxury of having no competition.

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Jan 18, 2017

10% of Top Brands on Amazon Are Private Label or Exclusive Deals

We ran some numbers and found that roughly 10% of TOP 10,000 brands on Amazon are sold by a single seller. Out of TOP 1,000, which includes Sony, Hewlett Packard, Fisher Price, and many other major brands, 5% of of them are sold by one seller. We see a trend of manufacturers selling directly on Amazon, and new brands being created by retailers themselves, so this percentage should increase over time.

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Dec 6, 2016

Over 1,000 New Sellers Join Amazon.com Every Day

Amazon USA marketplace added 54,000 new sellers in a month. 120,000 new sellers joined all Amazon marketplaces in a month. Since we looked at this back in July, the growth rate has accelerated and Amazon USA has remained growing at a steady pace.

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Nov 29, 2016

Analyzing All 1,357,529 Brands on Amazon

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. 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. 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.

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