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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Today Etsy released Q3 2016 financial results and there is plenty to be excited about. Etsy reports that active sellers count grew by 11.3% from 1.5 million to 1.7 million. This shows the marketplace at a healthy state and growing. As we noticed when analyzing top Etsy sellers the key marketplace drivers are small and medium sellers. So as the marketplace adds more of those, it only gets better to the customers.
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October is all about Halloween. 7 out of the TOP 10 sellers are selling costumes. Compared to last October we are seeing a big shift in selling. Last year big sellers were able to participate in Halloween sales, however this year it is all about smaller sellers. The marketplace is shifting from massive retailers selling every brand possible, to small sellers focused on a few brands or manufacturers selling their own products.
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Just like we predicted when we looked at Amazon's Q2 results, by the end of the year marketplace sellers will finally be generating the majority of sales for Amazon. The marketplace share has been rising by 1% every quarter and in Q3 2016 it has reached 50%. This is a key turning point event because in 2017 marketplace sellers will be generating more sales than Amazon itself.
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