Articles

Mar 28, 2017

Amazon Lost over $7 Billion Last Year by Providing Free Shipping

Last year Amazon collected $8.9 billion in shipping revenue, but spent $16.2 billion on shipping costs. Thus the net shipping cost is $7.2 billion. Because of the growth in Amazon Prime membership and the current $25 minimum to get free shipping, fewer people are paying for shipping. This has resulted in shipping costs growing faster than shipping revenue. As shown in the chart below, during the busy Christmas periods the difference is very large.

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Mar 23, 2017

Walmart Marketplace Passes 10,000 Sellers Milestone

Today Walmart passed a big milestone - 10,000 sellers on the marketplace. Even though Walmart marketplace was launched in 2009, it took a while before it started to gain traction. The first time we covered Walmart was in May 2016, when the Walmart marketplace just passed 500 sellers.

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Mar 22, 2017

Fraudsters Are Using Hacked Amazon Seller Accounts to Scam Buyers

We've been covering scam sellers issue for a while now, but lately we noticed a new trend. Instead of opening new accounts, which Amazon has been more proactive about shutting down, they are using old dormant seller accounts.

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Mar 21, 2017

How Vendors Are Funding Amazon's Growth

Retailers like Amazon create cash by buying goods from vendors and selling them to consumers. We recently made Amazon Cash Conversion Cycle public, it was -37.40 last year. What this number means is that after Amazon collected payments from customers it only paid their supplies 37 days later.

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Mar 16, 2017

30% of Top eBay.com Sellers Are from China

We looked at the top eBay US stores to see where they are located. We found that roughly 30% of the top 10,000 sellers are based in China.

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Mar 13, 2017

Amazon.com 700,000 New Sellers in a Year, Less Than 10% Are Selling Today

In the last 12 months, we detected close to 700,000 new sellers join Amazon.com. Many more joined other Amazon marketplaces, but in this analysis we chose to focus on the US market alone.

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Mar 10, 2017

New York State is Proposing a Marketplace Sales Tax

New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo is proposing several tax-related changes in the 2017-2018 Executive Budget Bill, one of which is the marketplace sales tax. The bill effectively shifts the sales tax collection burden from the seller to the marketplace.

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Mar 6, 2017

In Amazon Europe Most Sellers Sell in More Than One Marketplace

Amazon in Europe is a unique market - while there are 5 separate marketplaces (UK, Germany, France, Spain and Italy), the countries are close enough to each other that they can be treated like a single marketplace. So we decided to analyze European marketplaces and see how much of cross border selling is there.

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Mar 3, 2017

Rakuten Is Scaling down in US, Terminating Many Sellers in the Marketplace

In an unexpected turn of events Rakuten sellers received an email saying that their seller privileges are to be terminated because Rakuten is "focusing our efforts on a very limited assortment of products and merchants in the near term".

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Mar 2, 2017

Why China E-Commerce Is Growing Faster Than the US, and How US Brands Can Participate in the Boom

China's e-commerce market is larger than any other country's in the world - it represents almost a half of e-commerce sales worldwide. While US retailers on Amazon are starting to feel the competition of Chinese competitors, the question is how is this competition going to go the other way.

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