It is learned that Marketplace Pulse recently released its annual review of the e-commerce market in 2023 , which deeply analyzed the market overview, development trends and challenges faced during the year. Today we bring you the first half of the market report.

In 2023, the growth rate of US e-commerce sales hit a new low since the 2009 recession, increasing by only 7% to more than $1.1 trillion. However, this figure is still higher than the pre-epidemic forecast and exceeds the trend line by 14%.

In terms of market share, Amazon's position in the US e-commerce market cannot be underestimated, accounting for up to 40% of the market share. However, compared with the entire US retail industry, Amazon's share is only 4%. This means that despite Amazon's unparalleled influence in the e-commerce field, the offline physical retail industry has not been greatly impacted.

Looking deeper into the data, we can find that Amazon’s platform share in the US market is as high as 80%, which undoubtedly highlights its absolute leading position in the e-commerce field. For other e-commerce platforms, Amazon is still an insurmountable peak.

It is worth noting that in addition to Amazon, other e-commerce platforms are also actively seizing market share. As a leader among them, Shopify's comprehensive spending growth rate of millions of stores continues to exceed the overall market.

In 2023, Shopify's annualized GMV successfully exceeded US$200 billion. There are two reasons behind this achievement: Shopify continues to attract new merchants, and more and more consumers choose to buy products directly from brands.

In order to further consolidate its market position, Shopify also tried to launch a market platform similar to Amazon and launched a web version of its Shop application. Compared with Amazon, Shopify is closer to QuickBooks and has given up its own logistics business. Despite this, the market platform launched by Shopify is still of great significance to small businesses.

In 2007, the iPhone was launched, ushering in the era of mobile Internet; and in 2017, the rise of TikTok made social e-commerce come to the fore. These two milestones have profoundly changed the online shopping habits of American consumers.

In the past, consumers were used to logging into Amazon and placing orders through desktop computers. However, with the popularity of smartphones, the number of online shoppers has increased dramatically, and consumers' shopping habits have also changed dramatically. Today, they are more inclined to find shopping inspiration on social media, which has laid a solid foundation for the rise of social e-commerce.

In the US market, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok are the three major social giants. In the past, these platforms mainly relied on brand advertising to drive e-commerce sales growth. However, in recent years, as consumer behavior has changed, these platforms have begun to try to provide stores and checkout functions within the platform to better meet consumer needs.

In April 2023, Meta announced that users would need to use the in-platform checkout feature to shop in stores on Facebook and Instagram. TikTok followed closely behind, announcing in August that it would shut down its semi-closed-loop model in preparation for the promotion of TikTok Shop. Finally, in September 2023, TikTok officially opened TikTok Shop and achieved great success in the first Black Friday shopping festival in the United States. Today, the best-selling items on TikTok Shop have sales of more than 100,000 units per month.

At the same time, Amazon is also looking for opportunities to develop its social e-commerce business. In December 2022, Amazon launched the Inspire feature similar to TikTok. However, due to unclear positioning, insufficient content, and competitive pressure from TikTok Shop, the feature did not develop as expected.

What makes TikTok Shop unique is that the consumer's path to purchase is very different from traditional shelf e-commerce. This makes it difficult for platforms such as Amazon to compete with it, but Amazon has found a way to break through. Amazon announced a partnership with Snapchat, Facebook and Instagram to allow buyers to link their social media accounts with Amazon, thereby enabling the sharing of advertising targeting data.

Before this, consumers usually needed to jump to the Amazon platform to check out by clicking on the Amazon product link. But now, when users click on Amazon ads through social media platforms, a streamlined version of the Amazon product page will be loaded, and users who choose to join can check out from the product ad using their saved Amazon payment information and have it shipped to the saved Amazon shipping address.

According to people familiar with the matter, at the end of 2022, Amazon executives met with executives of TikTok's parent company ByteDance to try to create a new advertising format that would allow customers to purchase products from Amazon ads on TikTok without leaving the app. Unfortunately, the cooperation was not ultimately reached, and TikTok chose to launch its own e-commerce business, TikTok Shop.

Retail media advertising on Amazon and other e-commerce platforms marks the third wave of digital advertising. Today, Amazon's advertising business has an annual operating revenue of more than $40 billion, a five-fold increase since 2018. This significant growth has had a profound impact on the entire e-commerce industry, prompting other e-commerce platforms to launch advertising services.

According to data from eMarketer and GroupM, in 2023, the total retail media advertising revenue in the United States will be almost twice the total of broadcast and print media advertising revenue. This trend indicates that retail media advertising is rising rapidly and the gap with TV advertising is narrowing rapidly. It is expected that by 2028, retail media advertising revenue will exceed TV advertising revenue. These ads occupy the advertising space that originally belonged to the natural display position in the search results.

In the digital advertising industry, Google and Meta were once known as the "duopoly", but in 2023, the two giants accounted for less than half of the total digital advertising in the United States for the first time since 2014. For a decade, the digital advertising industry has been in a duopoly situation.

However, Amazon’s rapid rise as the third largest player has changed that, showing that the digital advertising market is becoming more competitive and not just a duopoly.

Compared with other retail media platforms, the digital advertising market has seen the emergence of many new entrants, the most representative of which are social media platforms such as TikTok. These new entrants have gradually occupied a place in the digital advertising market through unique positioning and marketing strategies.

It can be seen that with the changes in consumer behavior and continuous technological innovation, the e-commerce industry is undergoing an unprecedented transformation.