After trading closed today Amazon announced second quarter results. Amazon beat expectations on both top and bottom line. We were very happy to read that marketplace sellers continue to do very well. 49% of all sales on Amazon were done by marketplace sellers. We can only expect that number to finally reach 50% by the end of the year.
Read moreeBay reported its Q2 2016 earnings today. Marketplaces delivered $19.8 billion in gross merchandise volume (GMV), up by 5%, and $1.8 billion of revenue, up by 3%. eBay higlighted the fact that eBay.com and other marketplaces have over 1 billion live listings for the first time. In Q1 there was 900 million active listings, so the products' catalog has grown by 11% in just three months. Given how the big the catalog was to start with, that's a very impressive growth rate.
Read moreExploding Kittens, a marketplace seller with only 3 products in stock, had one of the biggest hits on Prime Day. While Amazon has sold a lot of Fire TV and Kindle products, out of the Top 20 products sold on Prime Day, Exploding Kittens: A Card Game About Kittens and Explosions and Sometimes Goats is the interesting one.
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We estimate that 112,540 new sellers joined the Amazon Marketplace in a month. 46,000 alone joined the Amazon.com marketplace. A lot of these new sellers will end up never selling a single product, nonetheless it does show the sheer amount of businesses and retailers exploring the possibility of selling on Amazon. When we analyze the fastest growing marketplace sellers every month the list consists of mostly new companies.
Read moreToday Amazon shed some light on the upcoming Prime Day 2016. Confirming the importance of the marketplace, 30% of all deals will be from marketplace sellers, with the remainder 70% offered by Amazon itself. The number of marketplace sellers taking part in Prime Day 2016 grew by 100% year-over-year, and the number of deals offered by marketplace sellers grew by 100% as well. As Prime Day becomes an expected annual event the amount of marketplace sellers participating will continue to increase.
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Like many of the previous eBay reports, fastest growing sellers in June were a diverse group of sellers. eBay.com customers left 22,877,010 feedback ratings this month. In comparison, Amazon customers left only 4,651,740 ratings. Thus people who buy on eBay are more likely to comment about their buying experience, even though a lot of Amazon sellers are now sending follow-up emails to their customers asking to leave feedback.
Read moreIn June more sellers saw a decline than were able to grow their sales. The fastest growing seller was Simple Modern, a classic case of private labeling. They only have 6 products in stock, but all of those products are their own brand and thus they are able to avoid competition from other sellers.
Read morePrime Day is back for a second year. Amazon hasn't confirmed the date yet, but we are hearing very reliable rumors that Prime Day is back on July 12th this year. In 2015 Prime Day sales on July 15th increased by over 200% compared to the same day the year before. With some sellers having their best day of the year, even considering Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
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Even though the Walmart Marketplace launched in 2009 it has been slow to grow. When we reported on it in May it had only grown to 500 sellers. Walmart has been working on perfecting their processes and improving the software side of it which implied the limited growth of the marketplace. Nonetheless since then it has been growing at a steady pace and just crossed 1,000 sellers.
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"In the UK and Spain, the cost of growth relative to the size of the businesses has led to plans to close these operations" said Rakuten this week. Rakuten acquired Play.com in 2011 for $40 million, and turned it into Rakuten.co.uk in months following. Despite global presence in Japan and the US, Rakuten.co.uk struggled to match Amazon UK and eBay UK.
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