Topic: E-commerce
Millennials buy more clothes on Amazon than any other website – Recode (Mar 11, 2017)
Groceries and clothing are two categories where I and others might once have assumed Amazon would never be a serious force, because they appear to lend themselves so poorly to online purchases. On the grocery side, Amazon still is a minor presence, but in clothing it’s now starting to make real inroads, especially among younger age groups. Of course, this data says nothing about total online purchases as a percentage of clothing purchases, and it’s likely that physical retail still dominates, but within e-commerce Amazon is now the biggest retailer among millennials, which is quite the achievement. It continues to feel like Amazon is methodically looking at those retail segments where it’s underrepresented and methodically breaking down the barriers to growth. And of course even in the groceries category it’s doing some interesting things.
via Millennials buy more clothes on Amazon than any other website – Recode
The Bad News and the Really Bad News for Retailers Fighting Amazon.com – WSJ (Mar 6, 2017)
There are some interesting numbers in here – notably that at its current growth rate, Amazon’s North American retail business could double in size in the next three years, or put another way, that it could suck the same amount of value out of the US retail market in that period as in its entire history to date. Realistically, growth is going to slow a bit, so it’ll take a little longer than that, but the broader point remains: Amazon is vacuuming up tens of billions of dollars of additional retail spend each year, and that has to come from somewhere. Given how small a share e-commerce still has of total retail spend in the US, that means it’s largely going to come from brick and mortar retailers, who have been suffering as a result. Some retailers have been able to recover a little lately in sales growth, but largely at the expense of margins, while one or two retailers have managed to find niches that seem somewhat immune to Amazon’s encroachment. We’re not going to see brick and mortar retailers take this all lying down, though, and one of the most interesting things to watch in the next couple of years will be how effectively these companies can pare Amazon’s growth back if they’re willing to be aggressive enough on margins. I suspect we saw a little of this in Q4, when Amazon’s growth rate dropped a few percentage points, but we might see more of it going forward.
via WSJ
Google Home now lets you shop by voice just like Amazon’s Alexa – TechCrunch (Feb 16, 2017)
“Just like Alexa” is a bit of a stretch here, because the whole point of Alexa’s ordering is that you know the products will come from Amazon. Google Home, by contrast, will order from a range of different Google Express merchants, only some of which are available nationwide. And because most people don’t have a Google Express account set up yet, they’ll have to do that first before they order anything. Lastly, unlike items bought using a Prime subscription, shipping will be charged extra after a short promotional period. Despite all that, this is obviously an area where Alexa has had unique capabilities and where Google Home has now closed the gap a little. By far Home’s biggest disadvantage is still its lack of awareness and distribution.
via TechCrunch
Amazon just shared new numbers that give a clue about how many Prime members it has – Business Insider (Feb 15, 2017)
I had missed this earlier in the week, but we got some juicy new numbers from Amazon as part of its 10-K filing, and they’re quite illuminating when it comes to Prime. This article specifically talks about Prime subscriber numbers, but the same underlying figures from the 10-K can also be used to derive some other interesting conclusions about Prime revenues and so on. I put together an in-depth blog post just now on all this, which you might want to check out too (my subscriber numbers are a little different from Morgan Stanley’s).
via Business Insider
Amazon Reports Fourth Quarter 2016 Financial Results (Feb 2, 2017)
Amazon had a somewhat disappointing quarter relative to analyst estimates, as growth slowed in its core e-commerce business. Unit shipment growth, which had been above 25% for the last five quarters, dropped suddenly to 24%, which impacted overall growth rates, as those dropped for the second quarter in a row. The International business had significant losses for the second straight quarter as Amazon invests more heavily overseas in fulfillment, market entry, and extending services like Prime video globally. AWS grew at a healthy clip, though margins are flattening at around 26% lately. As usual, executives on the earnings call were not helpful in understanding or predicting the big swings in both growth rates and investment levels, though guidance for Q1 looks fairly light. The official explanations are the anniversary of a leap year in 2015, which added 150 basis points to growth, and currency headwinds, which are being mentioned more frequently again on earnings calls lately. But it looks as though Amazon may be expecting slightly slower growth in Q1 too. Dropping back down to the high teens and low twenties growth rates Amazon saw in 2014 and 2015 wouldn’t be the end of the world, but it would be a rather different trajectory from the one it’s been on for the past year and a half, and investors would react accordingly.
via Amazon
Walmart is going after Amazon Prime with free two-day shipping and no membership fee – Recode (Jan 31, 2017)
Walmart is making two changes to its free shipping program: eliminating the $49 annual fee, and lowering the minimum purchase amount that qualifies for free shipping from $50 to $35. This doesn’t give the impression of Walmart coming from a position of strength, but rather one of weakness, where it has to keep making concessions and changes to try to make its equivalents to Amazon’s Prime service look more enticing. Of course, there’s also an argument to be made that Amazon’s Prime service works so well psychologically precisely because it has a hefty annual fee – once you make that commitment, you’re more likely to purchase lots of things through the site to justify and make use of the money already spent. Removing the membership fee means that users have no special reason to prefer Walmart over Amazon for any given purchase. At this point, I don’t think many people are choosing Amazon for shipping alone – they likely just think of Amazon as the default option for online retail, and if they happen to be Prime members (which many American households are) that seals the deal. Short of going all-in on free shipping a la Zappos, I’m not sure that any changes Walmart makes to its shipping policies and prices will move the needle meaningfully.
via Recode
In Move to Facebook, Barra Leaves Unfinished Expansion at Xiaomi – Bloomberg (Jan 30, 2017)
This is a good overview of how the international part of Xiaomi’s business fared over the last several years, while Hugo Barra was in charge, and it argues that Xiaomi’s progress during that time was limited to some countries and mostly symbolic elsewhere – gaining mind share but not market share. And of course, it still hasn’t fully launched in the US, which can be considered the biggest failure of Barra’s leadership of the international business, with the company’s first big CES press conference one of his last official actions in the role.
via Bloomberg
PayPal Has Been Talking With Amazon on Payments, CEO Says – Bloomberg (Jan 27, 2017)
This is an interesting but not unexpected development – PayPal already powers lots of payments for e-commerce purchases online, and the biggest past barrier to doing the same with Amazon was the close ties between PayPal and eBay. With that relationship now severed, PayPal is free to pursue this opportunity further, and with Amazon the largest e-commerce retailer in the US and a number of other markets, that could be a big boost. It’s less obvious that it will make a huge difference for Amazon, since it has credit cards on file for many of its regular customers, but it could well help reduce friction for occasional or first-time users, potentially providing a wider funnel for eventual Prime members. The other interesting wrinkle here, of course, is that even without the eBay angle, these two companies still compete with each other for web payments – Amazon has a much smaller third party payments platform which is used as an alternative to PayPal by some online retailers.
via Bloomberg
Amazon Expands Into Ocean Freight – WSJ (Jan 25, 2017)
Amazon seems to be treating building its own shipping infrastructure as a major strategic goal at present, from running its own planes to shipping its own sea freight. That’s partly about leverage over the traditional companies it has historically outsourced these jobs to, and partly about flexibility and control over the infrastructure it needs to get the job done. The further Amazon goes down this route, the harder it becomes for anyone to compete on a level playing field – Amazon’s logistics and distribution infrastructure is reaching a point where it’s becoming a massive competitive advantage.
via WSJ
Google Uses Its Search Engine to Hawk Its Products – WSJ (Jan 19, 2017)
This is a really fantastic bit of a analysis commissioned by the Wall Street Journal. It found that for 91% of searches relating to top consumer electronics categories, a Google or Nest product was in the top ad slot above the results, and in 43% it had the top two slots. This is Google competing with its own advertisers, and Google apparently was so taken aback by the analysis that it tweaked its strategy when the WSJ spoke to Google about it, and the numbers are now much lower. Google’s hardware push therefore not only puts it in conflict with its OEMs, but also with its biggest customers – advertisers. I’m intrigued to know how other big consumer electronics brands feel about this, but the challenge of course is that they have few alternatives – Google dominates search, and so it also has a dominant position in pitching its own products. There’s a close analogy here to Amazon’s hawking of its hardware on Amazon.com, but competitors know what they’re getting into there to a greater extent.
via Google Uses Its Search Engine to Hawk Its Products – WSJ
Target Announces November/December Comparable Store Sales Down 3% – Target (Jan 18, 2017)
This is Target’s preliminary press release for fourth quarter sales, which provides November/December comparable sales data in percentage growth terms, and the picture isn’t great. Comparable store sales were down 3% year on year for the last two months, and even though digital (online) sales were up 30%, that couldn’t make up the difference, and total transactions were flat while fourth quarter revenue will be down. The reason is that digital sales still make up only a tiny minority of Target’s overall sales – 5% in the 2015 holiday season, so a lower share than e-commerce’s overall share of US retail sales. That number will certainly be higher for 2016, but it highlights the challenge all big brick and mortar retailers have to face in Amazon: even if they’re able to match its strong growth in online sales, their physical retail operations still take an even bigger hit.
via Target 2016 Holiday Sales Press Release
To take on Amazon, Walmart is streamlining its retail and web teams – Recode (Jan 13, 2017)
Every story about Walmart (or any other brick and mortar retailer) rejigging its e-commerce arm is bound to be seen in the context of Amazon’s dominance of the space, and Walmart has famously struggled in e-commerce despite its massive scale. At least two of these moves are about consolidating leadership of online and offline retail domains, which is a logical step (and one that Apple, for example, took a couple of years ago). Others reflect ongoing hiring from outside Walmart to strengthen its leadership team, and it looks like Jet is also being further integrated into the company, which was inevitable. Walmart won’t report its December quarter earnings until February 21st, but it will be well worth watching what impact, if any, Jet is said to have had on its performance.
via To take on Amazon, Walmart is streamlining its retail and web teams – Recode
Amazon to Create More Than 100,000 New Jobs across the U.S. over the Next 18 Months – Amazon press release (Jan 12, 2017)
This is just the latest in a series of announcements from major tech companies (not to mention car companies and others) about job creation in the US in the run-up to the inauguration of Donald Trump as US President in a week’s time. It’s worth putting the numbers in context a bit – 100k new jobs in the US in 18 months compares to around 135k new jobs created globally over the last 18 months. 180k US employees at the end of 2016 would be 57% of my estimate of 315k jobs globally, so 100k new US jobs suggests only a slightly higher run rate and ratio of US to global jobs to the past 18 months. As with a lot of the announcements we’ve seen lately, this seems mostly about highlighting existing job creation plans rather than some new direction.
via Amazon – Press Room – Press Release
Xiaomi stops disclosing annual sales figures as CEO admits the company grew too fast – TechCrunch (Jan 12, 2017)
It’s been apparent for some time that Xiaomi’s early stellar rise was not sustainable, and in 2015 it had to revise its guidance for smartphone sales downward and even then missed it by 10 million. Its business is growing though, including hitting $1 billion in sales in India last year, a strengthening retail business, and good growth in “Internet services”, though those still make up a small minority of sales, for all the talk about Xiaomi as a services company. At this point, Xiaomi is far closer in its model to Amazon than to Google or even Apple in its model – a retail and e-commerce company which sells some of its own hardware and also has a growing services business. But it’s been missing its targets and there’s no clarity about profitability yet at this point. Lots more detail in the CEO letter.
via Xiaomi stops disclosing annual sales figures as CEO admits the company grew too fast | TechCrunch
Amazon to Launch Credit Card for Prime Members – WSJ (Jan 11, 2017)
This is yet another example of Amazon pursuing its flywheel strategy of reducing friction and providing incentives for people to spend more time and money on Amazon. The 5% cash back feature for Amazon purchases will be compelling for many people, since it’s basically free money for things many of them would already buy there, but since it’s a higher percentage than for purchases made elsewhere, it may also shift some buying to Amazon. This is a smart move and I’m curious to see how many people sign up for this (something we will of course have to rely on third parties to tell us).
via Amazon to Launch Credit Card for Prime Members – WSJ
Amazon Prime membership approaching 50% of US households, says Baird – Twitter (Jan 6, 2017)
This report from Baird’s retail analysts cites its own survey on several points around selection and Prime. It estimates that there are 55-60 million Prime households in the US, out of around 125m total households. Some of the biggest expansion categories in selection are apparel, office/industrial, and home/kitchen, where Amazon has historically been weaker. There are tons of other data points in the linked report, which is well worth a read.
via Carl Quintanilla on Twitter
Walmart has acquired a Zappos competitor to boost Jet.com’s shoe business – Recode (Jan 5, 2017)
Walmart has been hard hit by Amazon’s success and dominance of e-commerce, but has lately been taking more proactive steps to fill gaps in its own e-commerce portfolio, using its Jet acquisition to make further buys. Given the sheer number of small- to medium-sized e-commerce plays out there, Walmart can easily snap up these focused providers and roll them up into its broader e-commerce offering, accelerating its efforts to become more competitive with Amazon.
via Walmart has acquired a Zappos competitor to boost Jet.com’s shoe business – Recode
Fulfillment by Amazon Delivered More than 2 Billion Items for Sellers Worldwide in 2016 – Amazon (Jan 4, 2017)
This is one of those Amazon press releases with very few real numbers and lots of relative ones, but those numbers are still impressive. Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) is about half of third party seller units on Amazon, which in turn are about half of total unit shipments, so Amazon likely sold around 8 billion total units in 2016. Growth rates for FBA and seller units are higher than overall growth rates, because both are growing as a percentage of total sales, but this still suggests very high growth for Amazon overall in Q4. We’ll know more in a few weeks, of course, when Amazon reports earnings.
via Amazon – Press Room – Press Release
Amazon plans to sell its own line of workout clothes – Recode (Jan 4, 2017)
Taken together with the news that Amazon is one of the potential bidders for American Apparel, this is yet more evidence that it’s very serious about the clothing space. Activewear is one of those categories where some people definitely care about brands and are willing to pay for them, but others just want functional clothing at a decent price, and Amazon could do very well among the latter segment. The rise of activewear at stores like Gap and sister company Old Navy over the last several years is a great illustration of this opportunity, and Amazon is smart to try to tap into it.
via Amazon plans to sell its own line of workout clothes – Recode
Flipkart salaries: Documents reveal high pay of employees at bleeding Indian startup — Quartz (Jan 4, 2017)
In case you’re not familiar with it, Flipkart is the big homegrown competitor to Amazon in India, where the two companies are going head to head in an aggressive fashion, paying (according to this article) high salaries, but more broadly losing lots of money in the process. Amazon, of course, has deep pockets filled by its businesses elsewhere and more recently by AWS, whereas the Indian business makes up most of Flipkart, so if this becomes a game of chicken, Amazon may well come out on top.
via Flipkart salaries: Documents reveal high pay of employees at bleeding Indian startup — Quartz