Amzon (AMZN) Comps Growth Accelerates to 34.4% in June; eBay (EBAY) Up 12.3% - ChannelAdvisor

Amazon.com (Nasdaq: AMZN) and eBay (Nasdaq: EBAY) are active in early trading Friday following recent data from ChannelAdvisor.

On a blog post Thursday night, ChannelAdvisor announced the following data for June same-store sales:

• Amazon - Amazon's June SSS came in at 34.4%, an increase compared to May's 28.1% . The Amazon Fire Phone was announced in June and could have caused some knock-on effects. We have Amazon details further down in the report.
• eBay - eBay's June came in at 12.3% up from May's 11.5% indicating that eBay started to recover from the double whammy of the data breach and Google Panda problems from May. We have eBay details further down in the report that show what is going on with this marketplace.
• Other 3PM -3PM continued strong growth in June coming in at 51.5%. While this is a decrease from 78.3% recorded in May, this channels are a bit more volatile in m/m performance than larger more established channels. @~51%, they are growing 3X e-commerce which is quite impressive and they are our fastest growing channel.
• CSE - Comparison Shopping Engines came in at 6.7% for June up from May's .4%.
• Search - Search came in at 20.4% for June, an increase from May's 11.7% y/y growth. Later in the report we have more search details.

eBay Details:

eBay's SSS for May was 12.3%. To get a feel for what is driving the marketplace's performance, here are the interior data points for the month:

• eBay auctions - Down 19% y/y.
• eBay fixed-price - Up 18.4% y/y - an increase from May's 13%, which puts this key part of eBay growing faster than e-commerce again after the May dip.
• eBay Motors (parts and accessories) - P+A was down again in June coming in at 10.5% compared to May's 15.2%. This brings P+A's growth rate below e-commerce and is the slowest SSS we have recorded since February 2013's 6.8%

Amazon Details:

As mentioned in the introduction, we have had many requests for any details we can provide on Amazon, specifically around Fulfillment By Amazon (FBA). One common misperception about FBA is that sellers have all of their SKUs in FBA or none of them - effectively outsourcing their entire warehouse operation to Amazon (or not). In reality, most sellers have 10-20% of their SKUs in FBA and use it as a way to accelerate their 3PM sales by making their products prime-eligible and also improving their chances at owning the buy-box.

The other unknown very popular feature of FBA is the ability to fulfill for any channel (not just Amazon) from FBA. As a seller, you have to hard-commit inventory to FBA by physically sending the inventory there. It can be very hard to predict demand and even harder to predict demand by channel.

For example, let's say I have 1000 widgets and sell on a variety of channels. Maybe I send 500 to Amazon and have 500 in my warehouse. Much to my surprise, I sell out of the 500 in my warehouse and have 100 left at Amazon. I can continue to sell on all my non-Amazon channels and use the 100 items in Amazon FBA to fulfill on these channels with Amazon Multi-Channel FBA. This feature in ChannelAdvisor is ~18months old so we now have a good set of data to include.

Today we are releasing two new datapoints around FBA:

• Percent FBA - This measures the % of Amazon GMV through the ChannelAdvisor system that was fulfilled through FBA and tracks it on a y/y basis. For June 2014, 31.8% of Amazon GMV was FBA (therefore 68.2% was NOT shipped via FBA). That was up from June 2013 where 28.7% of the GMV was FBA. That's a 10.8% increase y/y in FBA as a % of GMV.
• %FBA non Amazon - Here we look at the total bucket of FBA-driven GMV and look at the % that was not fulfilled for Amazon sales (website, other 3PMs, search, cse, etc.). In June 2013, .9% was non-Amazon fulfilled. Then in June 2014, we saw this grow 92% to 1.8%.

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