During the last three months of 2017 Amazon's revenue from third-party seller services was $10.5 billion. For the first time surpassing $10 billion in a quarter. For the full year it was $31.8 billion. It is easy to misunderstand the scale of Amazon's marketplace since the company reports so little on it. The $31.8 billion in fees in a year is why most analysts estimate it at over $100 billion in GMV.
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The big news story today is eBay announcing that it will stop working with PayPal as its back-end payments service in 2020. Modern marketplaces are bundles of vertically integrated services, payments are a big part of it. eBay independent from PayPal will do better.
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Since June last year Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) usage has grown considerably. Across all marketplaces the percentage of sellers using FBA has on average increased by 10 basis points, for example on Amazon.com it is up from 58% to 69%.
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“There is this erosion of what it means to be a traditional consumer product brand. Amazon is becoming something like the umbrella brand, the only brand that matters.” If true, one should be building a brand which embraces this.
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eBay marketplace has tens of millions of sellers selling worldwide, but the majority of sales is done by a small pool of top sellers. We estimate that top 5,000 sellers account for 25% of worldwide GMV on eBay.
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What Amazon likes to talk about are rarely the things which matter. Instead Amazon is playing poker by only revealing the hints it wants you to see. Amazon's drones is a head fake.
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Amazon launched in Australia in December last year. One month later the marketplace attracted over 5,000 sellers. In fact, Amazon Australia is the fastest growing marketplace relative to its size. 55 new sellers join every day.
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Retail works best when it is boring, and profitable. As much as there is innovation on how customers shop, and what products get made, at the end of the day it is about supply and demand.
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In a statement issued this morning Amazon announced that more than 140,000 sellers surpassed $100,000 in sales on Amazon marketplace in 2017. Amazon also said that more than 300,000 US-based sellers started selling on Amazon last year.
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Physical goods are rarely made in the US. Often the country of origin is China. China has been exporting goods to the US for decades, but now Chinese manufacturers want to sell direct-to-consumer. Marketplaces like Amazon are a perfect avenue.
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