First year of Marketplace Pulse

Last summer I was on a routine flight from west coast back to NYC, reading the news when I noticed an article on YouTube stars. The fans were outraged having learned how much Felix Kjellberg, known as PewDiePie on YouTube, was making from his channel. Someone had analyzed the top YouTube channels and estimated their income.

This reminded me about ecommerce marketplaces. In most countries around the world marketplaces are generating the majority of all ecommerce sales. For example, Amazon sales topped $30 billion last quarter. Yet most customers are oblivious to the fact that when buying from Amazon they are likely not buying from Amazon itself.

Instead they are buying from thousands of small sellers on those platforms. And some of those small sellers are not that small at all, generating hundreds of millions of dollars in sales every year. It was reported that 49% of the Amazon’s $30 billion figure came from marketplace sellers. That’s $15 billion in sales last quarter from companies no one has heard of.

When I landed I built Marketplace Pulse.

I took the idea from that YouTube analysis and put all Amazon.com sellers on a big list to figure out who are the top sellers. I wasn’t sure how useful this would be, so I built it as a website and waited for visitors to come in. Over the next few weeks Google started to send some traffic, and I started having thoughts that this could be so much more.

As we gathered more data it became clear that there is incredible potential to analyze it and provide insights. Most business news are press releases rewritten to sound unique. But here we had a chance to create our own content by looking for trends in the data. In the same way Forbes or Wall Street Journal covers businesses trends, the idea for Marketplace Pulse is to have data-driven coverage for sellers behind the largest marketplaces.

Amazon.com data was enough for a prototype, but by now our data includes close to 10 million sellers across more than 20 marketplaces. This allows us to analyze how quickly the marketplaces are growing, what type of sellers are selling on them, how much international trade happens, how different categories compare, etc. Not a lot of people care about answering these questions, but many ecommerce players do. So we are able to take our data and knowledge and directly help other businesses in the industry too.

Both of these sides — public insights and partnerships — were not part of the initial plan. Because there wasn’t a plan. The prototype website was growing, we listened to what visitor analytics and direct inquiries were saying, and took it from there. In a year we are just starting to figure out what we should do next. If I know anything about startups, it is to build and launch even the smallest idea, listen, and adapt to what users are saying. We did that, and it worked.

When I said that no one has heard of the sellers who generated half of the sales for Amazon, this is the main reason Marketplace Pulse exists. We are opening up an otherwise unknown side of ecommerce, and in a lot of cases giving sellers a sense of credibility.