More than ten thousand sellers attended the 5th annual Amazon Global Store Cross-Border Summit held in Shanghai on December 11-12th. Twice as many participated in the live online broadcast because the event was sold out. The event didn’t present any breaking news, but keynote speakers laid out Amazon’s areas of strategic focus in China.
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Amazon, not unlike other retailers, is making the shopping event starting on Thanksgiving calmer. Deals are no longer constrained to Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Instead, they are spread out over days leading up to it and continue once it is over.
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In September, Amazon expanded product reviews by allowing shoppers to leave a star rating without a written review. For example, the Apple AirPods received, on average, 20 new reviews a day. Since the introduction of ratings, the rate of reviews didn't change, but consumers leave an additional 30 ratings per day.
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While many have tried to combine product discovery and commerce, Instagram is the closest. The app has become the dominant platform for discovery, especially in the clothing and beauty categories. However, the friction of making a purchase after discovering a product on the app has been significant. Instagram is now solving that.
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There are close to 3 million active sellers on Amazon marketplaces worldwide, an increase of 17.7% in a year. A seller is active if they have products listed for sale. Less than 10% of the active sellers were able to achieve $100,000 in yearly sales, and only 1% reached $1 million in sales.
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US e-commerce grew 17.3% in the third quarter, the fastest growth since the fourth quarter of 2011 more than seven years ago. Retailers generated $145.7 billion in online sales in the third quarter compared to $124.2 billion a year ago.
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This year, Walmart added 10 million products to the online catalog, but only half a million of that is sold directly by Walmart. The marketplace brought the rest of the assortment as it accelerated in growth by adding 10,000 new sellers since the start of the year. Today Walmart CEO Doug McMillon said, "we need even more progress on Walmart.com with general merchandise," for the past few years that progress came almost exclusively from the marketplace.
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Nike, one of the most searched brands on Amazon, will stop selling its products directly on Amazon, ending a pilot program that began in 2017. To avoid losing the Nike assortment, Amazon has been recruiting third-party sellers with Nike products so that the merchandise is still available on the site.
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eBay search results now start with five sponsored product ads. The company has recently adjusted the mix of promoted and non-promoted listings at the top of search results, which previously rarely had ads. The default search page format has 48 listings plus an additional 13 sponsored listings.
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Brands and retailers will spend $9.85 billion on advertising on Amazon in the US to boost their position in search results. Amazon advertising is growing beyond performance marketing in the form of sponsored products, though. Amazon is going after ad budgets under CMOs, looking for a more holistic advertising strategy and not just bottom-of-the-funnel ads.
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