"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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We noticed that often products sold by merchants are not fulfilled from the local country. For example it's not uncommon to see products shipped from China on Amazon USA. Thanks to ever-decreasing fulfilling costs most Amazon marketplaces have become global platforms. Thus we looked at where most of the sellers are based.
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eBay Shipping Supplies is a unique seller. It's not really a separate seller - this is eBay selling eBay branded packaging for sellers. Recently eBay is trying to compete with Amazon by increasing their brand awareness, and one of the ways is by offering sellers credits to buy packaging supplies. Since almost all Amazon sales come in a box with Prime marketing, eBay wants a similar effect.
Read moreOverall May has been a slow-growth month with most sellers continuing at their current pace or seeing a decline. The market is switching into Summer mode as sellers offering outdoors, swimming and sports products are accelerating. Fastest growing retailer Relevant Gifts sells various gifts and home decoration products. Most of the brands sold are only available from Relevant Gifts so they don't have to deal with a lot of competition.
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Many sellers rely on Amazon as not only a marketplace, but also as a fulfillment partner. Fulfillment by Amazon, or FBA, is a program which offers warehousing and order fulfillment services for an extra fee. This week we wanted to look at how many of those sellers are using FBA. In our estimates we consider any seller using FBA for at least half of their products. This makes it much easier for sellers to offer fast shipping and also makes their products available under Amazon Prime for free shipping.
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Walmart reported 2016 Q1 results this week, and while the company has posted positive results and outperformed the estimates, ecommerce growth has been disappointing. Despite big investment into its websites and the Walmart Marketplace, ecommerce sales rose only 7% in the quarter.
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China's ecommerce market is already the largest in the world, yet it continues to grow. Despite Alibaba and JD.com facing challenges expanding delivery networks to reach over 1 billion people living in rural areas, both have posted better than average growth numbers in Q1. Alibaba Group reported 24% year-over-year growth of gross merchandise volume (GMV) at $115 billion. JD.com reported it's sales grew by 55% to $20.1 billion.
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Amazon.com marketplace has been around for many years, and millions of retailers have tried selling on it. As Amazon launched international websites, they have also been adding marketplaces there as well. Since we are tracking all 11 marketplaces, we have unique visibility into each of their performance. Thus we decided to look at the amount of active marketplace sellers - sellers who we estimate to have sold at least one product in a month.
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Walmart launched the Walmart Marketplace in 2009. Since then Walmart has been hard at work perfecting the marketplace and adding key executives to grow it. Currently Walmart has over 500 marketplace sellers, with 200 of them actively selling products (others have joined recently and are yet to have a sale, or have since stopped selling). We are working hard to provide richer information about every seller soon, but you can already see how many products they sell, in which categories they sell and what is the average product price. Furthermore, you can inspect the top sellers by feedback ratings received in the last month, three months, twelve months or lifetime.
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We have featured Pharmapacks in many of our fastest growing amazon sellers reports. They are projecting to do between $140 and 160 million in revenue this year, and if all goes well do as much as $300 million in 2017. Keep in mind that they did $32 million in 2014, just two years ago. Only a few sellers ever have achieved such growth.
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