Client Letters: Trends, News and Rumors

Written By Commerce Canal

First month of 2025 brings some food for thought in trends, news bites and rumors within the marketplace world. Don’t worry, not going to bore you with my hot take on DeepSeek!

Trends

  • Initial Amazon 1P term negotiations have been relatively lax and brought early initial concessions. When coupling negotiations with net PPM data and flexibility, conversations have been more “open” than prior years.

  • DSP is outperforming Sponsored Display on many accounts and quickly becoming essential component to any major 1P or 3P business seeing relatively weak customer count growth.

  • January has been relatively weak for most major 1P brands in POs and top line sales as Amazon brings inventories in-line.

  • Amazon earnings are coming on February 6. Early indicators is this past quarter was all about profits. We anticipate marginal retail sales increases yet significant profit increases year over year. This is a profit quarter.

  • Direct Advertiser agreements coming from Amazon Advertising have been completely non-committal and we are seeing the data made available on many 3P accounts.

  • Google search market share is below 90% for the first time since 2015.

News

  • Amazon 1P brings back City, State and Zip Codes to order level data. If you need to isolate your 1P sales by location, that capability is back under retail analytics!

  • OpenAI has made Sora (videos) and Operator part of their paid $200 per month plan. We are using Sora for several clients PDPs and sponsored videos with favorable results.

  • Amazon Vine now “free” for up to 2 units on 3P.

  • Amazon Try Before You Buy is shutting down on 1/31. This should assist in slowing the growing return rates.

Rumors

  • Amazon AWD “discounts” will carry into 2026 as Amazon seeks to have more customers move their supply chains to Amazon to offset the higher FBA fees.

  • Amazon Haul, the Amazon Temu competitor isn’t going well. Limited awareness, limited offering = limited results.

  • Amazon will look to further restrict cross border NARF program as cross border tariffs loom.

  • Walmart looking to launch a “free” Reviews Accelerator program similar to Vine.

Lastly, if you made it this far. Here is an overview from SmartScout of the categories with China based sellers as a percentage of the overall category:

Please reach out with any questions or further context needed on any of the above points.

Thank you and chat once Amazon/Walmart earnings are released,

Ryan

Commerce Canal
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