Unbundling eBay
Hundreds of companies took a category on eBay and improved selection, experience, or business model. Combined, they are larger than eBay and have valuations exceeding eBay's multiple times.
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Articles
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Amazon Is Burying Organic Search Results
Of the first twenty products a shopper sees when searching on Amazon, only four are organic results. There is little space left for organic results at the top of the page, the real estate that drives most sales.
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Target Is Not Scaling Its Marketplace
Target is sidelining its marketplace. Three years since its launch, Target's marketplace has 250,000 products from just 450 sellers. Target only adds a dozen new sellers every month to the invite-only marketplace.
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eBay's Market Share Slips to Below 5%
eBay now accounts for less than 5% of U.S. e-commerce. It had a more than 10% share less than a decade ago. But as the rest of the market continued to grow, eBay did not keep up.
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E-Commerce Lost Market Share in 2021
U.S. e-commerce penetration decreased in 2021 because offline retail grew faster than e-commerce for the first time in history, and the online shopping boost from the Covid-19 pandemic cooled off.
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Shopify Is Now 50% As Large as Amazon Marketplace
Shopify is now nearly 50% as large as Amazon Marketplace after surpassing $54 billion in GMV in the fourth quarter of 2021. Said differently, Amazon marketplace is only two times larger than Shopify.
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60,000 Amazon Sellers Exceeded $1M in Sales
Sixty thousand sellers eclipsed $1 million in sales on the Amazon marketplace in 2021. The number has doubled over the past three years.
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Advertising Is Masking Amazon’s Unprofitability
Without the high-margin advertising revenue, Amazon's retail business is increasingly unprofitable. It was at break-even as recently as 2015. Since then, as advertising revenue grew, so did Amazon's use of that growth to fund the rest of the retail operations.
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Amazon GMV Reached $600 Billion in 2021
$600 billion worth of goods were sold on Amazon in 2021. The total gross merchandise volume (GMV), including sales by Amazon itself and by the marketplace, doubled in three years. Most of that growth came from the marketplace.
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Amazon Marketplace is 25% of US E-commerce
Twenty-five cents of every dollar spent shopping online goes to the Amazon third-party marketplace. Were Amazon's marketplace an independent platform, it would be the largest online retailer in the U.S.
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