Amazon's 2019 Year in Review in 12 Figures

Review of the year on the eve of the new decade. If we've counted correctly, there were 12 months in 2019... so we're giving you the same number of numbers!

2020 is here! 2019 was a very, very productive year on Jeff Bezos' marketplace. Between the opening of five distribution centers, the creation of 1800 jobs in France, the deployment of new features on amazon.fr and the discovery of new planets in the Amazon galaxy... there was indeed a lot to do! Little tip to follow all this: subscribe to our newsletter and follow us on LinkedIn. But you already do that, don't you? For the New Year, we'd like to take a look back at Amazon's 2019 figures. The ones that speak the loudest, the ones that give us a reading grid on what Amazon was in 2019 and what the platform will become in the future. Most of this data comes from the Marketplace Pulse studies. If you're allergic to numbers, don't leave!

Let's sit back, have a coffee, and rewind 2019.

2019 is the year of all records for sellers and brands on Amazon.

1. We like zeros in sales-side stats

• $200,000,000,000. This is the sales volume achieved by third party sellers on Amazon, far ahead of FBA sellers ("sold and shipped by Amazon") according to Jeff Bezos. Is that too many zeros for you? Let's put it in words: two hundred billion. If you counted at the rate of one per second, you'd have 6342!

• 3,000,000 active sellers are listed on Amazon. An "active seller" is someone who has at least one product currently on sale. This is 17.7% more than last year. Of these three million sellers, France has 211,000. Is this a counter-performance for all that? Not really, it shows one of the best increases compared to 2018, of 29.2%. This makes it one of Europe's leading marketplaces.

• 280,000 sellers exceeded €100K in sales in 2019. This may not seem much, but it is on the contrary almost 10% of active sellers. And among the latter, how many have an optimized presence on Amazon? Probably the same percentage. If you are interested in joining them, contact us.

• 42% of the active sellers in Amazon's sixteen marketplaces are based in China. Two years ago it was 26%. We were already talking about the Chinese influence on the blog Bizon a few months ago, the trend is still true. So there's a real niche to invest in order to promote French quality. We shouldn't miss it.

2. Amazon, brands territory

• 78% of searches on Amazon do not include a brand name. This means that people who want to buy on Amazon start with a generic search before deciding which brand to go for. We think this is a very important number. Let's put it another way: if you don't appear in the first results, you're invisible to 78% of consumers. That's why it's important to take advantage of the maximum possibilities offered by Amazon's algorithms, the core of our expertise. Which brings us to another fact…

• In 2019, 1300 AmazonBasics products were "best sellers". This is interesting in the sense that it is a direct consequence of the previous figure. The products respond to an identified need, are well placed on the keywords responding to that need... and they score. We can nevertheless qualify this statement as Amazon "Basics", "Collection" and "Essentials" still carry the name of the brand and are the strongest ranges.

• $400,000,000 has been invested since the launch of Project Zero by Amazon. Project Zero is the name given to the project to combat counterfeit products on Marketplaces. Some 5,700 brands have joined the program. Why it's important: Counterfeiting is a real problem for Amazon. It tarnishes its image and is used as a reason for some brands to leave Captain Bezos' ship (and here, we're thinking very strongly of Nike who was featured on the Bizon blog).

On the Marketplaces side, Amazon's 2019 figures show an increase in the number of sellers and the sales volumes they generate. The strength of Amazon's trendy brands also illustrates the need to have an exemplary presence on the platform.

2019 is the year Amazon definitely became more than just a Marketplace…

• $9,850,000,000 were invested by brands in advertising on Amazon. Another hard figure to read! Come on, let's round it up to ten billion. September 2019 marks the launch of "Sponsored Display", a retargeted advertising offer (you know, the infamous cookies) allowing you to receive personalized ads aimed at brands with smaller budgets than those concerned by its "Demand Side Platform", or DSP offer. In addition, Amazon has 7.6% of the US online advertising market.

• 60 notices per day are left on average on the Amazon page of Apple's Earpods. That's 1800 per month. The reason for this is the addition of the ability to leave a note without leaving a written notice on Amazon. Extrapolating to all product categories, the number of rated products will probably take off. We know the influence of online reviews in the choice of a product and this is even more true on the leading e-commerce site.

• 49.4% of Amazon's 2019 results are generated by e-commerce. This is the first time this percentage has fallen below 50%. Cloud Hosting, Prime, Advertising are the poles constituting the majority of the other 50%. In 2019, Amazon is everywhere!

2019 is the year of the dizzying numbers on Amazon…

• 3 500 000 000 packages were shipped and delivered by dedicated Amazon services. Consequently, this makes Amazon a very serious competitor to UPS and FedEx in the USA. It was also learned at the end of the year that Amazon was banning FedEx services from its Prime service. Quite simply. "Until the quality of these delivery services improves", still leaving the more expensive FedEx Express service available.

• 56,000,000 bank transactions were recorded on Black Friday in France. No need to remind you which platform preempts a good part of world trade, making this period a key moment for year-end purchases in France.

Bonus: 2019 on Amazon, it's also the year of the numbers we didn't expect

Do you have a headache? We promise, it'll be over soon. If you've finished your coffee, it's almost time to make another one at the office machine. And what better time to shine with colleagues than this? The following two bonus items are all designed to do just that. It's a gift!

• The Lord of the Rings has already been signed for two seasons on Prime Video. What you may not know is that with an estimated budget of over a billion dollars, it's the most expensive series in history.

• Amazon revealed that its Alexa connected speaker was used to turn on the Christmas lights tens of millions of times over the month of December in the US. And the light was.