Amazon weakens in grocery & sues over fake reviews

Even if it is difficult, we would still like to take a look at the latest developments in e-commerce with our newsletter this week.

Amongst others, Amazon is once again taking action against providers of fake reviews – this time with a lawsuit against agencies that make money from them. In addition, analyses from the US show that Amazont’s attempts to gain a foothold in the grocery retail business have not yet brought the desired success. In Europe, the draft legislation for a new supply chain law is currently causing uncertainty among brand manufacturers and online merchants.

Lastly, in the past few weeks, the world’s largest online marketplaces published their Q4 results from 2021. Remazing CEO Hannes Detjen shares his detailed analysis of the results below in the newsletter.

Updates: Amazon.

Amazon is still not succeeding in conquering the grocery business

Despite its strategic initiatives in the grocery sector such as Amazon Go, Amazon Fresh, Prime Now, and the acquisition of Whole Foods, Amazon is still only a small player in the U.S. market: the company only has a 2.4% local market share, while competitor Walmart reaches a whopping 18%. Even Amazon’s usual strength of leveraging technology and data has been performing underwhelmingly so far: Amazon’s AI-based ‘Dash Cart’ has achieved only half of the expected 30% share of all purchases in Amazon Fresh stores. Given these numbers, Amazon has taken immediate action: The company will close all of its 4 Star, pop-up and Amazon Book stores to prioritize its grocery-related concepts.

Amazon sues two companies providing fake reviews

Amazon is suing AppSally and Rebatest for selling fake reviews. They provide merchants with “review authors” who leave positive reviews on the marketplace in exchange for money or free products. Together, AppSally and Rebatest are believed to employ more than 900,000 fake reviewers. Meanwhile, Amazon takes actions against fake testers with a combination of artificial intelligence and more than 10,000 employees.

Amazon is pushing for American football game on Black Friday

According to industry reports, the Seattle-based Internet giant is trying to convince the US football league NFL to add a game to its schedule in 2022. The game is supposed to take place in November on the day after Thanksgiving – the well-known “Black Friday.” However, the NFL has so far been rather reluctant to enter into such an agreement. It would not be the league’s first deal with Amazon though: Starting next season, the cloud and e-commerce company is already paying $1 billion a year for the exclusive rights to broadcast 15 “Thursday Night” games and one preseason game via Prime Video.

Updates: E-Commerce

Allegro expands its marketplace to Europe

As one of the global top 10 websites in e-commerce, Polish marketplace Allegro is now accessible to consumers in the entire European region (with the exception of Malta and Cyprus) following the introduction of English-language services. With the help of strategic partners, international deliveries and payments in Euros have been made available to online shoppers. The acquisition of Mall Group, which operates in Central and Eastern Europe, will further strengthen Allegro’s European presence, according to the company’s press release.

New e-commerce record expected in the US

This year, annual e-commerce sales in the US are expected to exceed $1 trillion for the first time: Industry experts expect sales to grow from $919.06 billion in 2021 to $1.07 trillion in 2022. With these figures, e-commerce accounts for 15.9% of retail sales in the US. However, online retail grew slower than offline retail for the first time last year. Market share has fallen as brick-and-mortar retail sales are once again growing faster due to lifting of COVID restrictions.

EU supply chain law causes uncertainty among SMEs

A new draft bill by the EU Commission for an EU-wide supply chain law aims to oblige larger companies to take more responsibility for violations of environmental and human rights standards within their supply chains. Experts warn against unrealistic requirements and fear that medium-sized companies in particular could withdraw from international markets to avoid any risks to their business – which would actually defeat the goal of improving the working conditions of workers in foreign countries.

What caught our attention

Amazon is apparently testing a filter in its search function that allows buyers to display products in a certain price range – starting from “under $25” up to “$200 and above”. So far, we have only discovered the price filter in some searches; there is currently no discernible pattern by category or product.

Comment: The largest Online Marketplaces in Q4 2021

The largest online marketplaces in the world have all released their Q4 earnings by now – time for a comparison of their growth and total revenue figures. Some key findings:

• Once again, Argentinian marketplace Mercado Libre has grown the most (as in all of last year’s quarters). Like Amazon, Mercado Libre is not only an online marketplace but diversifies its business in different services such as advertising and finance.
• Specialized marketplaces such as Zalando and Etsy and local marketplaces such as Allegro managed to grow faster than the bigger generalists.

• In Q4 2021, Amazon ranked only 6th in terms of growth rate – but if you look at the total sales of the past year, the e-commerce giant is again finishing at a significantly higher level than all other online marketplaces.
• The growth of all online marketplaces has slowed down overall. 2021 was a very successful year for the global e-commerce industry, but compared to the gigantic online boom in 2020 triggered by the Corona pandemic, the growth rate has declined.

Remdash: Content Monitoring

With Remdash, content monitoring of your own products on Amazon is possible in many ways:

• Automatic case upload and tracking when content changes
• Control whether optimized content is live
• Analysis of the content performance of your own products at a glance with the Remdash Retail Readiness Score
• Comparison of products with own SEO benchmarks

Interested in Remdash? 
Just click here to schedule a personal product demo with our team.

Top 5 Amazon Keywords

While Amazon shoppers in Italy, Spain and Germany increasingly searched for carnival costumes on the platform, children’s costumes for the “World Book Day” (taking place locally on March 3, 2022), were in high demand in the UK. In France and the US, on the other hand, iPhone cases were in particular demand at the end of February.