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During its third-quarter earnings report today, Amazon said it was spending big to navigate the turbulent end-of-the-year supply chain. Though profits fell below expectations compared to recent quarters, CEO Andy Jassy said that was because the company was fortifying itself against a turbulent supply chain
Amazon is outsourcing pickup opportunities to retailers. Big retail chains like Best Buy, as well as independent businesses like MODIA, have already joined the Local Selling program. Customers who buy products from these retailers on Amazon can select, at checkout, the option to ship the order to each store.
Two recent surveys looked at how Amazon aggregators are preparing for the year to come. Taken together, the two surveys offer a portrait of how aggressively aggregators are looking to acquire new brands and how much money they are aiming to spend on those acquisitions -- all despite growing skepticism of their operational skills.
Amazon's announcements at Unboxed, its advertising conference, show how focused its pursuit of brand advertising dollars is.
Individual brands are copying the Amazon aggregator model and trying to scoop up their own marketplace sellers. The addition of CBD brand Grove underscores that interest in the Amazon aggregator business model is spreading -- but that doesn’t mean established companies are rushing to acquire marketplace products quite yet.
Amazon announced that "440,000 brands" are currently enrolled in Brand Registry worldwide. Some experts who spoke to Modern Retail see that stat as surprisingly low, especially in light of the fact that Brand Registry is offered for free. And it may point to the types of sellers who make up much of Amazon's marketplace.
A new tool called the Product Opportunity Explorer will offer a way for sellers to determine how successful a product they are working on might be on Amazon -- or to figure out which high-interest subcategories they might want to target with their next products. For Amazon, meanwhile, the tool is a way to fill out its overall product selection. By anonymizing its data, the company believes that it can encourage sellers to embrace subcategories in which Amazon is in need of high-quality products.
There’s a simple way to prove that Amazon’s advertising playbook has reshaped the industry: major retailers across the board are copying it. According to data from the e-commerce growth agency Profitero, retailers of all types have added significantly more ads to search results over the past year. Walmart, the largest brick-and-mortar retailer, is leading the pack, growing its average number of ads on the first page of search results from 1.9 in October 2020 to 4.0 in August 2021.
Until now, Amazon has had largely uncontested control over merch from viral streaming shows -- but the Netflix partnership gives Walmart a new leg up over Amazon when it comes to selling merch. It is also kicking off a battle between Amazon and Walmart to control merchandise for streaming shows and films, as sellers on both platforms vie to offer tie-in products that ride the waves of virality.
Amazon's 4-Star stores are kitschier and don't get as much attention as some of its more high-tech concepts, like Amazon Go. Yet 4-Star offers two benefits that none of Amazon’s other physical store concepts do yet: one, it’s a showroom, and two, it doubles as a fulfillment center.
While Amazon’s new insurance marketplace might not say a lot about the company’s ambitions in the insurance space, it does signal the extent to which Amazon has become a center of commerce -- not just for typical consumer products, but for services of essentially any kind as well.
SellerX, a major Amazon aggregator in Europe with $266 million in funding, appears to have acquired ReviewMeta, a website for verifying the authenticity of reviews on Amazon. For the growing business of e-commerce aggregators, this is likely the first of many to come.
Amazon recently admitted that it banned 3,000 seller accounts, though one trade group in China puts the number closer to 50,000. The mutually beneficial relationship between Amazon and its biggest China-based sellers -- which has proven instrumental to the growth of the third-party marketplace -- seems to be on shaky ground.
Companies like Pharmapacks and Anker are the first third-party sellers to go public. But more and more, Amazon sellers are achieving enough scale that they can stand as public-facing brands in their own right.
In 2020, Amazon Logistics delivered 4.2 billion parcel shipments, up from 1.9 billion in 2019. It now makes up, by volume, 21% of the parcel shipments in the U.S., behind the USPS (38%) and UPS (24%) but ahead of FedEx for the first time (16%).
Earlier this month, resale platform Rebelstork – which buys back and sells refurbished baby gear – launched in the U.S. The Canadian startup, founded in 2019, is positioning itself as a white-glove and sustainable shopping service for parents. As resale continues to become more popular, more companies like Rebelstork are trying to corner the secondhand market in niche product categories.
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