Journalists all over the world rely on Marketplace Pulse insights and data for their stories. Marketplace Pulse works with leading magazines, newspapers, and online publications, including The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Bloomberg, and CNBC.
Journalists all over the globe rely on our insights and data for their stories. Here are some of the most recent articles Marketplace Pulse was featured in.
The way Juozas Kaziukėnas, founder and CEO of Marketplace Pulse, sees it, “You’re either competing with China [or] you’re sourcing from China [or] you’re dealing with upcoming tariffs on Chinese goods, or you’re competing with Chinese platforms.”
Most of these merchants are based in China, according to estimates by ecommerce intelligence firm Marketplace Pulse.
Durch die Investitionen erhöhen sich jedoch auch die Kosten; die extremen Billigpreise sind noch weniger zu halten als zuvor. „Der verrückte Preisvorteil, den sie in der Vergangenheit hatten, ist verschwunden“, urteilt Juozas Kaziukėnas, Chef des Analysehauses Marketplace Pulse.
Juozas Kaziukėnas of research firm Marketplace Pulse noted that big Chinese merchants try to hedge against the possibility of a ban by operating hundreds of seller accounts, often under a variety of names and addresses.
Juozas Kaziukėnas, founder and CEO of Marketplace Pulse, told Retail Brew that it’s early days for Haul. Amazon has not marketed the service so far—a sign that it’s still in its test and learn phase.
“We’ve not seen ads on Facebook or Google, and we’ve also not seen ads inside of Amazon itself,” Kaziukėnas said.
“It’s a soft launch for Amazon, and I think that people that have discovered it have found it accidentally in the Haul tab, at the top of their app, or perhaps many of them also kind of saw it in the news,” he added.
But Kaziukėnas was quick to add that people are indeed buying items on Haul because they have begun to show up on Amazon’s bestsellers list for random and niche items like bestsellers in sewing rickrack, or in women’s novelty head wraps, or in machine tools lamps, to cite a few examples.
“We’ve been tracking Amazon bestsellers for a very long time, and Amazon Haul products are now slowly starting to appear amongst the best sellers on Amazon…They’re [showing up] in the niche, small categories, but they are starting to appear there,” Kaziukėnas said.
Juozas Kaziukenas, founder of e-commerce intelligence firm Marketplace Pulse, wrote in a November blog post that his firm tested Rufus by requesting gaming TV recommendations. The chatbot’s response included products that were not TVs. When asked for the least expensive options, Rufus came back with suggestions that weren’t the cheapest, Kaziukenas said.
Meanwhile, Temu is onboarding Chinese merchants to store inventory in the U.S., a move that would allow the company to not be as exposed to changes around the de minimus trade rule, said Juozas Kaziukenas, founder of e-commerce intelligence firm Marketplace Pulse.
“If you’re a brand and you find yourself competing with Shein and Temu, do something else,” said Juozas Kaziukenas, founder of e-commerce research firm Marketplace Pulse. “It’s a terrible business environment to end up with competing with someone that is ultimately pushing for the lowest price.”
Temu has made progress recruiting U.S. sellers in the last few months, including Amazon’s largest merchants. Five of the top 25 biggest Amazon sellers, according to Marketplace Pulse, now sell on Temu. Still, U.S. merchants represent less than 1% of Temu’s estimated 300,000 total sellers, Juozas Kaziukėnas, founder and CEO of Marketplace Pulse, said in an interview with Modern Retail. It will take time to see whether Temu’s wide open marketplace will attract more U.S. sellers to join.
“It’s true right now that Temu wants U.S. sellers, but I’m not sure if U.S. sellers want Temu,” Kaziukėnas said. “For now, Temu has practically no U.S. sellers, and Temu has to prove itself that it’s a good marketplace for those sellers.”
“It’s almost a bizarre twist to the history of Amazon and to the things it’s been building for so long,” said Juozas Kaziukenas, founder of market research firm Marketplace Pulse. By offering customers even lower prices on certain items if they’re willing to wait, “Amazon is in some ways admitting that e-commerce is not one-dimensional.”
Still, it may not be enough to slow down Temu and Shein.
Haul, currently in beta, is only available through Amazon’s app or on its mobile site for now. Kaziukenas compared it to other niche shopping channels Amazon has launched over the years, like its home for high-end goods, called Luxury Stores; its Etsy clone, Amazon Handmade; or its TikTok Shops competitor, Inspire.
“It has many of these sections of Amazon that theoretically exist yet in practice are not seen by many consumers,” Kaziukenas said. “[Haul] feels like a reaction and like a sort of a hobby project.”
While family warehouses are meeting some of the demand, their capacities are limited and make up a fraction of e-commerce logistics, according to Juozas Kaziukėnas, founder of e-commerce analyst firm Marketplace Pulse. “As sellers become more successful, they will inevitably need larger space and more volume,” Kaziukėnas said. “So your bedroom service will very quickly run out of capacity.”
“We’ve definitely seen Amazon increase their margins over the past couple of quarters,” said Juozas Kaziukėnas, founder and CEO of retail research firm Marketplace Pulse.
Kaziukėnas said Temu’s heavy reliance on digital ads—usually ads that promote specific products—shows how the retailer hasn’t become a mainstream name for U.S. consumers.
“Relative to other retailers, Temu has a high ratio of sales coming from advertising,” he said. “It has very little stickiness and perpetually has to spend on advertising to remind people that it exists.”
“The business model of growth through Amazon seller acquisitions, which defined aggregators, is dead,” said Juozas Kaziukenas, founder of Marketplace Pulse, which has tracked industry capital raising.
Interestingly, Marketplace Pulse’s research at the time showed that 40% of sellers were Australian locals. The other 60% were mainly from China.
Compared to Instagram, TikTok Shop makes it easier for businesses to work with up to tens of thousands of small creators and track their sales, Juozas Kaziukėnas, founder of e-commerce analyst firm Marketplace Pulse, told Rest of World. “On a platform like Instagram, it’s very unlikely that someone with 1,000 followers would ever be offered any similar deal, because the overheads of tracking for a brand would be a nightmare,” he said. “TikTok is spreading the number of potential influencers to millions or more users.”
However, import fees could vary by product. Juozas Kaziukėnas, founder of the e-commerce intelligence firm Marketplace Pulse, told BI that many Shein and Temu products would likely face import fees between 15% and 20%.
"Everything on Temu is also on Amazon but more expensive and faster shipping," said Kaziukėnas, adding, "The price gap between the same product on Amazon and Temu is going to shrink but it's not going to disappear completely."
"Temu and Shein won't disappear and will continue to be disruptive," Kaziukėnas said. "If price is the ultimate value proposition then they'll continue to steal market share."
“If and when this change goes into effect, it’s quite realistic that there’s going to be some period of time when deliveries just stop or start taking weeks as the system races to readjust to the increased volume,” says Juozas Kaziukenas, founder of Marketplace Pulse, an e-commerce intelligence firm.
Marketplace Pulse founder Juozas Kaziukenas has also been monitoring traffic to the sites in Australia and internationally.
“(Temu) will likely get to top three by the end of the year (in Australia) and challenge eBay for the second place in 2025,” Mr Kaziukenas said.
“These are web traffic figures that do not necessarily translate to revenue but they provide a sense of where the market is moving.”
Mr Kaziukenas said his New York based e-commerce intelligence firm’s analysis of the companies suggested they knew their customers well.
“SHEIN showed that direct-from-China for clothing has unique benefits – faster than fast-fashion iteration of designs. By comparison, traditional retail looks only fit to sell clothing pieces that don’t change with trends at all,” Mr Kaziukenas said.
“Temu instead is selling general merchandise goods that don’t become better by having a brand name written on them – from USB cables to kitchen spatulas.
“There are many considerations like environmental impact, over-manufacturing, supply chain resilience, etc. But we can clearly see that this model works well for some products.”
Temu -que segons Marketplace Pulse és la segona plataforma de comerç electrònic més visitada del món, després d'Amazon- es va crear el 2022 i opera a Espanya des de 2023, amb competidors tan forts com Miravia, Shein, eBay o AliExpress.
But China-based sellers make up a significant share of the company’s marketplace, representing nearly half of the top 10,000 sellers on Amazon in the U.S., per Marketplace Pulse, and driving nearly half of the third-party gross merchandise volume.
That said, Temu has taken steps to protect itself from such regulatory enforcement. Since March, Temu has been onboarding China-based sellers with warehouses in the U.S., according to Marketplace Pulse. “The shift to sellers with local warehouses has reduced its reliance on the de minimus loophole, improved shipping speed and allowed it to sell more sizes and weights of products,” according to Juozas Kaziukėnas, founder of Marketplace Pulse.