Just last month it was all about Halloween, but it immediately switched to Christmas gifts buying. Sellers like JAF GIFTS or Christmas Central are first to have massive growth because of it. The trend we are noticing is sellers focused on a specific category of products, like Christmas gifts, having the best pricing and products. Big sellers with thousands of brands are having a hard time competing with so many niche sellers.
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Adobe Digital Insights estimates Thanksgiving to Cyber Monday 5-day period sales at $12.8 billion, up by 15.2% from last year. It is hard to estimate how much of that was Amazon sales, but we think it was somewhere in the range of 25-50%. So with $3.2-6.4 billion in sales by Amazon during the holiday weekend we think it is safe to assume at least $1b in sales was from marketplace sellers.
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A very interesting metric for us is what sort of brands are on sale on Amazon, how many sellers sell them and how brands grow and shrink on the marketplace. A lot of the brands offered by a single seller or two are misspelled or mistaken brands. Of the 1,357,529 total brands on Amazon, at least a half could be discarded as duplicates. Each seller on average has 68 brands. However this average number is meaningless as it hides the distribution - most sellers have 10 or less brands.
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Earlier this month Foursquare estimated that foot traffic to stores will be down by 3.5% during the Black Friday sales day. Now that the Black Friday has passed we are seeing reports that this prediction was largely true. Online though, Black Friday set an estimated new record with $3.34 billion in sales, up by 22% from last year. Mobile accounted for $1.2 billion, a 33% increase from the year before.
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The US ecommerce market continues to grow, largely driven by leading marketplaces like Amazon, eBay and Walmart. According to the Q3 2016 report from the US Department of Commerce, online orders accounted for 8.4% of total retail sales, up from 7.4% a year ago. Ecommerce sales grew by 15.7% compared to Q3 2015, reaching over $101 billion. Ecommerce sales have been growing by 15% for over a year. A big part of this is Amazon which reported 26% growth the same quarter.
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Alibaba Group generated sales of $17.8 billion on Singles Day this year, up 32% from 2015. That's more than Black Friday and Cyber Monday combined across all US retailers.
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Spoken about in hushed tones in the boardrooms of retailers, the ecommerce giant is definitely coming to Southeast Asia via launch of Amazon Singapore and to Australia with Amazon Australia. Amazon has not officially confirmed those plans, but both of these are expected to happen in 2017. Many regions and countries used to be too small for Amazon to consider investing. However with the rise of smartphones, ecommerce is growing rapidly in most countries. Amazon plans to launch in Australia in September 2017. Amazon plans to enter Southeast Asia with Singapore launch in Q1 2017.
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One of the top sellers on Amazon, goHastings has reportedly filed for bankruptcy earlier this year and is now gone from Amazon. A seller of new and used books, music, movies and video games filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in June 2016. The sale of all merchandise and closing of all stores must have been completed by October 31st, and thus today goHastings is no longer in operation.
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Ecommerce sales (gross merchandise volume) grew by 16.8%, best quarter in 2016 so far. After 2 years of slowing growth, Walmart ecommerce efforts are starting to show results. Ecommerce is still only 0.5% of total Walmart sales. However last year it was just 0.15%, so ecommerce will continue to become a bigger part of Walmart every quarter.
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Similar to fastest growing Amazon.com sellers, October on eBay was all about Halloween costumes. Many of the top sellers were able to take advantage of the Halloween rush. It is hard to pick out one seller to highlight. There are many niche stores, like mayfair99 selling stamps, and the many costume sellers.
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