Marketplace Pulse
marketplacepulse.com · Group blog · on HN since 2017
Marketplace Pulse publishes research and data on Amazon, e-commerce marketplaces, and the sellers who use them.
What HN saysHN links it as a data source on Amazon's profits, private labels, seller origins, and fulfillment practices, used to support or counter arguments about Amazon.
27HN people shared it
11linked it in comments
80stories submitted
1.3Kstory points
1 year agolast shared
2017people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1Amazon Is a Monopoly2 people · 524 points · first shared 2019 · 328 comments on HN
- 2Everything on Amazon Is an Ad2 people · 70 points · first shared 2021 · 15 comments on HN
- 3American Sellers Lost Amazon to China2 people · 10 points · first shared 2025 · 3 comments on HN
- 4Amazon Private Label Brands Analysis2 people · 5 points · first shared 2019 · discussion on HN
- 5Number of AmazonBasics Best-Sellers Up Fifty Percent in a Year2 people · 1 points · first shared 2019 · discussion on HN
- 640% of the top sellers on Amazon are based in China, according to research1 people · 309 points · first shared 2019 · 187 comments on HN
- 7Shein forces Amazon to lower seller fees1 people · 145 points · first shared 2023 · 143 comments on HN
- 8Amazon Suspends Amazon-Native Brands Mpow and Aukey1 people · 47 points · first shared 2021 · 18 comments on HN
- 9Amazon Takes a 50% Cut of Seller's Revenue1 people · 19 points · first shared 2023 · 3 comments on HN
- 10Amazon’s Crackdown on Chinese Sellers1 people · 12 points · first shared 2021 · discussion on HN
- 11Only 22% of searches on Amazon include a brand name1 people · 7 points · first shared 2019 · 8 comments on HN
- 12Amazon-Native Brand Anker Goes Public1 people · 5 points · first shared 2020 · discussion on HN
- 13US E-Commerce Sales Surpass $1 Trillion1 people · 4 points · first shared 2022 · discussion on HN
- 14Amazon Is Never Going Back to Normal1 people · 4 points · first shared 2021 · 1 comments on HN
- 15Marketplaces Year in Review 20211 people · 4 points · first shared 2021 · discussion on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
panny · 2019-09-06
Since this is a Jeff Bezos' washingtonpost.com hit job, it's worth pointing out that Amazon Basics does the same as well,
https://www.marketplacepulse.com/articles/number-of-amazonbasics-best-…
pj_mukh · 2025-09-08
Or more likely it’ll look like the e-commerce adoption plots with a giant pop in the late 90s and then a 20 year slog of consistent growth [1]
Pretty much exactly what the S-curve looks like.
[1]: https://www.marketplacepulse.com/stats/us-e-commerce-growth-rate
soganess · 2023-03-06
Walmart's last quarter sales were about 115 Billion [1]
There are about 4700 stores in the US [2]
That means Walmart has per-store-daily-sales in excess of 200k. According to [3] I'm actually down an order of magnitude (3 million in sales a day for the "average" store)
That would have to be a hell of a lot of theft.
[1] https://www.marketplacepulse.com/stats/walmart-us-retail-sales
[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/269425/total-number-of-walmart-sto…
[3] https://www.zippia.com/answers/how-much-does-the-average-walmart-store…
wpietri · 2023-02-19
It's not just the graph. Their revenues were growing rapidly at the same time they were basically breaking even: https://www.marketplacepulse.com/stats/amazon-net-sales-94
So their profitability as a percentage of revenue was actually drastically declining. All during a period where investors were grumbling that they should start giving the money back to investors. But Amazon was intentionally keeping their profits very low because they thought they had better things to spend the money on. This was not a myth, this was a strategy. A long-running one. See, among many articles: https://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/22/technology/sales-are-colossal-share…
fmajid · 2022-11-24
Amazon will promote sellers who use their fulfilment service over those who DIY.
https://www.marketplacepulse.com/articles/fulfillment-by-amazon-chokeh…
vinay427 · 2022-01-27
I would assume the number includes all unique seller accounts as it doesn’t specify a constraint on seller activity or similar.
In fact, (less reputable) data from marketplace research claims a far higher number in 2021 of over 6 million.
https://www.marketplacepulse.com/articles/amazon-reaches-six-million-t…
gamblor956 · 2020-12-10
More than half of the products sold on Amazon are not sold by Amazon.com. (
https://www.marketplacepulse.com/articles/amazons-retail-business-is-n…
And a portion of the products that can be purchased from "Amazon.com" (the seller) are JIT orders that Amazon places with the supplier. This is why some products on Amazon are perpetually never "in stock" until a future date on the store listing page; Amazon has made the decision based on sales data to only order those products on demand. In such cases, the supplier will usually ship to Amazon for transshipment to the customer, but depending on the cost of logistics, Amazon may have them ship directly to the customer.
juokaz · 2020-05-08
We checked seller growth on competing marketplaces like eBay, Walmart, Google Shopping, etc. and found it to be the opposite - none are seeing accelerated seller growth.
Report here https://www.marketplacepulse.com/articles/sellers-are-not-diversifying…
tomohawk · 2020-04-23
Amazon is a monopolist in several categories. Different rules apply to monopolists than other organizations. A basic constraint is that a monopolist may not use their position of monopoly in one area to give them an advantage in another.
https://www.marketplacepulse.com/articles/amazon-is-a-monopoly-an-inte…
alehul · 2019-12-06
> we also ensured that 99.9% of all pages viewed by our customers were to products that had never received a counterfeit notice of infringement
While this initially seems impressive (i.e. 1 in 1,000 products are fake), Amazon has a power-law distribution to its sales, and thus likely to its views [1] [2].
This means that, as long as the products on the left side of the power-law aren't counterfeit, this claim can be true.
As a result, if you venture into niche product spaces, beware that you're looking at much higher odds of a counterfeit.
[1] http://ebusiness.mit.edu/research/papers/2010.09_Brynjolfsson_Hu_Smith…
[2] https://www.marketplacepulse.com/articles/marketplaces-power-law
evolve2k · 2017-07-09
Looks like as of 2017 they now fulfil to US via Amazon :)
https://www.marketplacepulse.com/amazon/usa/crumpler
https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B0118QTUKU?psc=1