When does Prime Day 2022 take place?
The world’s leading online marketplaces have recently published their results from the first quarter of the year. All of them largely reflect what has started to become apparent for some weeks now: e-commerce growth is slowing down in 2022. This development is partly caused by the effects of the ongoing war in Ukraine, but also by the prolonged COVID-19 lockdowns in China. Given the negative trend, Remazing Managing Director Filip Egert takes a closer look at the most recent development of Amazon and Shopify in his commentary in today’s newsletter.
On a more positive note, Amazon has released first details about the date of this year’s Prime Day. For the first time, the online giant is now also enabling merchants to expand their analysis of their performance on the platform through extended insights into their first-party data.
Updates: Amazon
Prime Day 2022 will take place in July
After much speculation, Amazon finally released the first details about this year’s Prime Day when it presented its Q1 results. The company stated that the sales event will take place in July – however, the exact date has not been announced yet. According to our estimates, the deal event could happen on 11 & 12 July. Even without a concrete date at this point in time, we recommend online retailers to start preparing for Prime Day 2022 now.
Advertising on Amazon comparatively cheap
A recent analysis conducted by Sellics has shown impressive results: After reviewing over 2 million active Amazon Advertising campaigns on 7 marketplaces, it is evident that on average advertising costs on Amazon continue to be much lower than on other online platforms. Facebook Ads cost on average 44% more than ads on the world’s leading e-commerce platform. Google Search Ads are even 68% more expensive. In addition, Amazon offers promising advertising opportunities thanks to its big reach and website traffic as well as the high purchase intent of its users. After all, Amazon’s advertising options offer many advantages in terms of cost efficiency and volume of advertising campaigns.
Amazon allows merchants insights into first-party data
Among online merchants, there has been long–standing criticism of Amazon for its lack of transparency with regard to first-party data. Now, the e-commerce giant is planning to provide merchants new insights into their performance on the platform, creating many new analytics opportunities. These will be accessible, for example, through Brand Metrics, the Product Opportunity Explorer and also the Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC). Innovations such as a search analytics dashboard are also in the making.
Amazon shuts down Selz
Australian online shop system provider Selz, which was only acquired in 2021 to better compete with Shopify, is getting shut down by Amazon. Selz provided SMEs with tools to set up e-commerce stores and process online payments. Amazon did not provide details on the reasons for the closure – but it is speculated that they are related to the expansion of Amazon’s own D2C & merchant services such as the newly launched “Buy with Prime” feature.
Updates: E-Commerce
Q1 2022 reports by online marketplaces around the globe
While MercadoLibre reported revenues of $2.2 billion in Q1 2022 with a year-over-year (YOY) growth rate of 67.4%, this same metric was only 5% higher than in 2021 for DIY marketplace Etsy, which reported $579 million in revenues. At the same time, Zalando posted a YOY revenue decline of 1.5%, reaching a total of €2.2 billion. Additionally, Ebay reported a decline of 6% YOY ($2.5 billion in sales). Local and vertical marketplaces continued to grow though, while for large generalist platforms the e-commerce boom of the past two years seems to be over for now.
Shein is the most downloaded app in the US
Chinese fast-fashion marketplace Shein is currently ranked #1 as the most downloaded app in the US, pulling ahead of major social media platforms such as TikTok, Instagram and Twitter. The app is also far more popular than that of Amazon. In Germany, however, Shein has not yet made it into the top 10 of the app charts.
What caught our attention
Since the mid of April, advertisers can search for and reuse existing creative assets to build their Sponsored Display campaigns in the Amazon Ads console. This update means that brands can easily reuse creative that they have already uploaded as a part of their Sponsored Brands, Stores or Posts efforts within Sponsored Display campaigns.
Comment: Shopify vs. Amazon –Slower Growth, Increased Competition
When comparing Amazon and Shopify’s Q1 2022 results, one thing stands out: the growth rate of both e-commerce platforms clearly has dropped.
While Amazon’s growth rate has only slightly slowed from +9% to +7% YOY, Shopify’s growth has nearly halved from +41% to +22% YOY. Shopify still managed to grow significantly faster than Amazon percentage-wise though.
Does this trend indicate that Shopify will outperform Amazon growth-wise in the quarters and even years to come?
Our assessment is that this is actually rather unlikely: When looking at total revenue numbers, Amazon still plays in a league of its own. Moreover, even though Shopify’s D2C business model is booming at the moment, Amazon has already started to invest heavily to take market share from its competitor. New features like “Buy with Prime”, which allow brands to use Amazon’s logistics in combination with their own online stores, show that the e-commerce giant is quickly adapting to new market developments. Amazon will not leave the growing D2C market to its e-commerce competitors without a fight.
On the other hand, Shopify recently announced its multi-billion dollar acquisition of logistics startup Deliverr. This step highlights that its efforts to build an own logistics and fulfilment network for the merchants using its self-service online shop platform is well underway – which is crucial to catch up with Amazon in the long run.
In any case, we are curious to see how the competition between these two leading e-commerce platforms will continue to develop in the future.
Remdash: Share of Voice
Remdash’s “Share of Voice” (SoV) feature lets you track your brand’s performance in searches on Amazon in a number of ways:
Defined keyword sets (e.g. Branded vs. Non-Branded)
Paid vs. organic performance
Historical performance
Automated tracking of competitors
Interested in Remdash? Just click here to schedule a personal product demo with our team.
Top 5 Amazon Keywords
While people in the US were searching for gifts and summer dresses at the end of April, the most searched keywords in Europe were mainly related to entertainment. British and German Amazon users primarily searched for football-related products, movies and TV series. In Spain, France and Italy, search queries were mainly related to music.