The Data Point: 61% of Online Sellers Increased Marketplace Usage in the Past Year

Amazon, Shopify and others are feeling the sting of slower online sales in early 2022. That’s likely transitory as physical and online retail rebalance for what could be a long recovery.

Even as social sites are leveraged by more sellers as sales channels and under dour stock market news, marketplaces are thriving, and their business remains strong.

For the PYMNTS report, “Online Sellers: The Future Is Multichannel,” we surveyed over 300 online merchants with revenues of at least $500,000 getting 40% or more of their sales revenue from marketplaces. Let’s look at three telling data points.

• 61% of online sellers say they have increased their marketplace usage in the last year.

Of the two seller profiles defined in our research — the “marketplace-reliant” that make up to 75% of their sales on marketplaces, and marketplace-native firms, which generate over 75% of their sales on marketplaces — both groups increased their usage over the past year.

Among larger, multiproduct merchants 68% increased marketplace use in the prior year, “as did 68% of firms that earn more than $100 million annually. The statistics are notably similar among newer firms: 69% increased their online presence in the last year, whereas just 54% of firms that have been in business for 20 years or longer did the same.”

• 42% of online sellers operate through four or more marketplaces.

With only 7% of online sellers of either type garnering 100% of sales from a single marketplace, the trend among sellers is sales channel diversification, as seen in the data.

“First-party websites and social media are the most common non-marketplace channels for these businesses: 61% of omnichannel sellers use first-party websites to sell their products, and 58% use social media,” per the study, which also found that 75% of all sellers list with Amazon.

• 92% of the sellers say analytics is their most used marketplace service

It would be easy to think that Fulfillment By Amazon (FBA) logistics is the service most used by online sellers, but our research finds that on sellers are engaging with metrics more, looking at what sells, what doesn’t, and other salient questions impacting inventory decisions and more.

“In addition to beefing up customer reach by using marketplaces, PYMNTS’ research found that customer analytics is the most commonly used service by sellers across all segments to help them reach more potential buyers, with 92% of the sellers surveyed doing so” per the study.

See the study: Online Sellers: The Future Is Multichannel