The electronic commerce has shown constant changes with respect to the trends amidst a rapidly evolving competitive environment. In USAas collected MarketplacePulse, ecommerce spending topped $1 trillion last year. However, falling valuations and layoffs have weighed heavily on the industry. There is no doubt that 2022 has been marked by a huge number of events that have revolved around ecommerce. According to the 5th edition of the annual report ‘Year in Review’ made by MarketplacePulsethese have been some of the most outstanding news of 2022.
ecommerce growth
In the third quarter of 2022, e-commerce spending in the United States exceeded $1 trillion in the past twelve months. A milestone that trends predicted would only occur in 2024. E-commerce spend was 25% higher than pre-Covid pandemic forecasts would have suggested. If the pandemic hadn’t happened and e-commerce was growing at the rate it was growing for years before, 14-15%, the annualized run rate would have been just $815 billion in the third quarter.
However, total retail spending had risen even faster than online retail. It reached a run rate of $7 trillion in the third quarter. Therefore, despite the fact that electronic commerce continues with a trend above the trend line, ecommerce penetration is returning to the pre-pandemic trend. In the third quarter, 14.8% of consumer spending occurred online. Excluding retail categories that don’t typically compete with e-commerce (restaurants, car dealerships, and gas stations), ecommerce accounted for 21% of retail trade.
Amazon Impact
Thousands of software companies help businesses sell on Amazon with inventory management, product research, pricing, compliance, advertising, accounting, tax and more. Although his own Amazon Seller Central acts as a starting point, sellers often use other tools to augment or replace the functionality of Seller Central. Brands that wholesale to Amazon also use some of those tools and a separate set of business tools. However, the startups in the Amazon ecosystem They have received little attention from investors. There have only been a handful of companies that have raised equity capital. The rest, often created by experienced salespeople, start up using their cash flows. In part, that’s because Amazon’s API creates a rigid bounding box that restricts how creative those companies can be. But also because of the perceived risk of platform dependency.
Amazon’s advertising has been the most active and fastest growing category of the company’s ecosystem and has seen more product launches and API changes than the rest combined
This has changed in the last two years. Funding for Amazon tools has accelerated and M&A activity has become more common. Amazon seller aggregators that rake in billions of dollars and some achieve valuations in excess of a billion dollars are one of the drivers of the surge in interest. The report also highlights that Amazon advertising has been the most active category. It is the fastest growing part of the Amazon ecosystem and has seen more product releases and API changes than the rest combined. Most of Amazon’s major advertising software companies have been acquired or have raised capital.
In April, Amazon introduced Buy with Prime. The service allows shoppers with a Prime membership to shop on non-Amazon e-commerce websites and pay using their Amazon account. Buy With Prime expectations go beyond one-click payment. Towards the end of the year, Amazon announced that brands could create a Shop with Prime page within their Amazon store and drive traffic to it using Sponsored Brands advertising. From this new page, shoppers can open the brand’s website and purchase the product using Buy with Prime.
Big year for Shopify
2022 was strong growth for Shopify and announced new integrations and features for customers. The application ShopifyShop added a global search feature, with which any user using Shopify Shop can search for any item in all Shopify online stores in the world. In addition, it allied with YouTube to create YouTube Shoppingwhere brands and merchants will be able to sell their products in three different ways: videos, live broadcasts and in the store tab and incorporated linkpopa new free functionality with which users can buy products directly through the link in the bio of the accounts in the networks of a brand or business without leaving the application.