Research

The seventh edition of the Year in Review report condenses the topics explored on Marketplace Pulse in 2024. Disruptors from China - Shein and Temu - and Amazon's reaction to them, the unique shopping behavior on TikTok Shop, why shoppers buy what they buy, the low-priced brandless market, the slow post-pandemic e-commerce growth, retailers selling ads, and whether AI is the future of shopping.

Fifteen years ago, Amazon made a bet that e-commerce is not going to change. That e-commerce of 2007 will still be the future a decade later. Jeff Bezos said, "I can't imagine that ten years from now [our customers] are going to say, 'I love Amazon, but if only they could deliver my products a little more slowly.'" As it turns out, it lasted even longer.

Hundreds of software companies help businesses sell on Amazon with inventory management, product research, pricing, fulfillment, advertising, accounting, taxes, and more. The landscape map covers the SaaS players providing services to Amazon sellers. While Amazon’s own Seller Central acts as a starting place, sellers and brands typically use other tools to augment or replace Seller Central’s functionality.

In 2022, e-commerce spending in the U.S. exceeded $1 trillion. A milestone that pre-pandemic trends predicted would only occur in 2024. Yet the industry appeared in despair marked by crashing valuations, employee layoffs, and seemingly slowing growth. The fifth edition of the Year in Review is a collection of the most interesting stories this year.

2021 was the year of broken supply chains, Amazon aggregators, more advertising, Shopify's almost-marketplace, and one unanswered question - did the pandemic boost e-commerce after all? For now, the world of marketplaces revolves around Amazon - it has doubled in size in two years. No one will challenge it directly, but a different paradigm might.

Firms acquiring successful brands on Amazon have attracted over $16 billion in capital raised. They are known as Amazon seller aggregators. The market had a breakout year in 2020 because of three factors: the pandemic accelerating spending on Amazon, Thrasio raising hundreds of millions of dollars, and Anker, an Amazon-native brand, going public.

2020 was the best year for e-commerce marketplaces in over a decade. E-commerce growth had a step change, and marketplaces captured most of it. In aggregate, it was the most successful year for sellers and brands that transact through them, too. The Year in Review looks at the state of marketplaces and describes the most important trends.

In 2019, sellers on the Amazon marketplace sold $200 billion worth of products. Amazon marketplace is so large it would rank as the 50th largest economy in the world if it were its own country. Below New Zealand's economy, but bigger than Qatar's. The Year in Review looks at the state of marketplaces and makes predictions on what's to come next.

According to Marketplace Pulse research, Amazon-owned private label brands are not nearly as successful as many paint them to be. Amazon has been successful in creating generic items at low prices, but only when using the Amazon brand name (i.e., AmazonBasics and Amazon Essentials). Otherwise, the hundreds of brands and tens of thousands of products launched are not resonating with customers.

The Year in Review looks at the state of marketplaces and their challenges, and makes predictions on what’s to come next year. It’s a deep-dive report built on our research, highlighting more than twenty different metrics and the context surrounding them.