Is Growth Harder Now For Amazon Sellers?

With its seemingly ever-growing popularity, Amazon is becoming more and more popular for online sellers — which, ironically, means that sellers are having to work harder than ever before to compete on Amazon’s marketplace, according to a new study.

ChannelAdvisor, which helps retailers sell on online marketplaces, crunched some numbers and discovered that same-store sales for its clients increased on Amazon 10.5 percent in August. Same-store sales grew for merchants on Amazon 6.4 percent in July, according to ChannelAdvisor.

Those might seem like pretty good growth numbers, but not so much when you consider that Amazon reported a 33.8 percent growth in general merchandise for the second quarter. So, merchants’ sales are not keeping pace with Amazon’s own growth.

In the past six months or so, Amazon has seen a “dramatic increase” in new merchants on its marketplace, according to Scot Wingo, executive chairman of ChannelAdvisor. Wingo said that these new merchants on Amazon’s marketplace are increasing competition and taking share from sellers who might have been hawking their wares on Amazon for years.

So, what’s fueling this surge in new merchants that is leading to increased competition?

China.

Sales of Chinese merchants doubled on Amazon between 2014 and 2015, and Amazon executives said at the end of 2015 that Chinese companies’ sales increased more than tenfold.

“There’s a lot of interest in China to sell to U.S. consumers,” Eric Heller, CEO and cofounder of Marketplace Ignition, a consulting firm that advises brands selling on online marketplaces, told Internet Retailer.