Just 10 years ago e-commerce penetration in China was less than 1 percent, but since then has taken off - it overtook US in 2013, and is expected that by the end of 2018 it will reach 18 percent market penetration.
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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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Previously thieves had to break in to brick-and-mortar stores or warehouses, and grab what they could carry. Imagine paying $2.50 and walking away with $220,000 without leaving your house. The Amazon marketplace which generates at least $50 billion in sales a year from the millions of sellers has become a retail economy by itself. This has meant that cyber crime against those marketplace sellers is potentially a very lucrative operation.
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India is the fastest growing market, both in terms of new sellers, and considering how many of them stay active selling for a longer period. At the current rate new seller joins Amazon US marketplace every 30 seconds. For many months now we've been detecting 100,000 new sellers join Amazon marketplaces every 30 days.
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China's e-commerce market represents almost a half of e-commerce sales worldwide, and practically all of it is on domestic websites like Tmall.com and JD.com. Most of the largest e-commerce markets in the world have Amazon and eBay with major market share, but not in China. Many would jump to the conclusion that China is a market favoring local players and US companies have no chance. But this is not the whole picture. Both Amazon and eBay could have had much more market share in China.
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"We want to be bigger than Walmart," said Jack Ma, the founder and CEO of Alibaba Group, in September 2014, when Alibaba began trading in the New York Stock Exchange. It didn't take long. In 2017 fiscal year Walmart's sales were $485.9 billion, while Alibaba's was $547 billion.
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Walmart reported 2017 Q1 results yesterday, and the big story is impressive e-commerce growth. Retailer's online sales jumped 63 percent, and GMV jumped 69 percent. However, we need to point out that Walmart used to report global e-commerce growth which included all of online properties. This means the 63 percent e-commerce sales growth has no base to compare it against.
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The Census Bureau of the Department of Commerce reported results for US E-Commerce 2017 Q1. E-commerce sales were $98.06 billion, up by 14.8 percent from a year before. This means e-commerce accounted for approximately 8.4 percent of total retail sales. However, e-commerce share is likely considerably higher.
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There is a lot of enthusiasm about traditional retail dying. E-commerce is growing at a faster rate, but retail as a whole is growing still. Retailers are now often dismissing any responsibility for their struggles, and are by default blaming Amazon for it. Often from an angle of being unable to do anything about it. The test for business management is to explain their future strategy without mentioning Amazon once.
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MercadoLibre (MercadoLivre in Portuguese) has become the de facto internet retail option for Latin America. While initially MercadoLibre was the eBay of Latin America, drawing inspiration and even design ques early on from the US auctions leader, it is now much more the Amazon of Latin America. It moved on from auctions to products at fixed price, and has focused on the infrastructure the most.
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