Ecommerce platforms are moving fast this week. Marketplace competition is heating up. Here's all you need to know:
- From small seller to 8-figure brand on Walmart Marketplace 💰️
- Amazon’s Spring Deal Days 🌼
- AI’s changing how shoppers find products 🔎
- Why retailers are fuming at Amazon 🗯️
AMAZON NEWS
Amazon is kicking off another major sales event—Spring Deal Days, running March 10 to March 16—with discounts of up to 40% across thousands of products from brands like Dyson, Sony, Bose, Samsung, and Shark.
Unlike Prime Day, the event is open to all shoppers, though Prime members still get perks like faster delivery and access to select Lightning Deals.
New promotions will drop twice daily, turning the event into a week-long stream of limited-time deals designed to keep shoppers returning to the platform.
For Amazon, events like this are becoming a key piece of its retail strategy. The company has moved far beyond the traditional holiday shopping calendar, using seasonal promotions throughout the year to maintain traffic and drive product discovery.
🌸 Seller takeaway: Amazon’s promotional events are no longer just Prime Day and Black Friday. They’re becoming a year-round traffic engine — and brands that plan inventory, pricing, and ad spend around these moments are more likely to capture the surge in shopper demand.
TOGETHER WITH WALMART MARKETPLACE
From small seller to 8-figure brand on Walmart Marketplace
The Perfume Spot sees high-tier success selling low-cost perfumes on Walmart Marketplace.
When The Perfume Spot entered the perfume business as a small e-commerce seller in 1999, it had no idea how big it was going to become.
Now, 7 years later on Walmart Marketplace, The Perfume Spot is seeing 8-figure GMV year over year. “Walmart Marketplace has been a key partner in helping us fuel our growth," says Jessica Mullevey, Director of Product Development, The Perfume Spot
With Walmart Marketplace, The Perfume Spot had a platform that:
- Opens the door to millions of loyal customers
- Charges no monthly or setup fees, just a competitive referral fee
- Has the tools and scale to help them grow
Ready to sell on the same platform The Perfume Spot uses to fuel its growth? Sign up for Walmart Marketplace. It takes just a few steps to start selling.
Sign up today.
*Conditions apply.
Join Walmart Marketplace today
BITES OF THE WEEK
- Amazon Tops Walmart: For the first time ever, Amazon has surpassed Walmart in annual revenue, reporting $716.9B versus Walmart’s $713.2B for the fiscal year.
- AI Boosts Basket Size: Walmart says customers using its AI shopping assistant, Sparky, are building carts that are 35% larger than non-AI users.
- Shopify Ads Enter ChatGPT: Shopify is expanding its Shop Campaigns network by placing merchant ads directly inside ChatGPT, with sellers paying only when a purchase occurs
- Tariff Evasion Hits Record Levels: A reported $112B trade gap between Chinese export data and U.S. import records suggests large-scale tariff avoidance, reshaping competitive pricing dynamics for U.S. sellers.
ECOMMERCE NEWS
AI’s changing how shoppers find products
Ecommerce accelerator Pattern just posted 40% year-over-year revenue growth in Q4, a signal that the way consumers discover products online is rapidly changing. The company said the surge reflects a broader shift toward AI-driven product discovery and multi-marketplace selling.
The numbers are telling. Revenue from non-Amazon channels jumped 94% in the quarter, showing brands are spreading their strategies across multiple platforms rather than relying on a single marketplace.
The company’s platform now processes tens of trillions of consumer and marketplace data signals, helping brands track pricing, demand, inventory, and visibility across marketplaces.
But the bigger takeaway isn’t just Pattern’s growth.
📈 It’s what it says about how ecommerce is evolving.
Large language models and AI shopping assistants are starting to influence how consumers evaluate products, compare prices, and narrow their choices before they ever land on a product page.
That changes the traditional marketplace playbook.
For years, brands focused on keyword ranking and ads inside marketplaces. Now discovery is increasingly happening through AI recommendations, conversational search, and algorithmic feeds.
Seller takeaway:
The future of ecommerce discovery won’t just be search results — it will be AI-curated recommendations. Brands that invest in strong product data, reviews, and cross-platform presence will have a better chance of being surfaced by these new discovery systems.bal expansion is easier than ever. But if you sell big or bulky goods, logistics infrastructure — not demand — becomes the real bottleneck.mization, and clean operational execution will outperform chaotic growth at all costs every time.
TRENDING TOPIC
Retailers are fuming mad at Amazon for these changes
Amazon is testing a controversial new feature that lists products from brand websites even when those brands don’t sell on Amazon. The beta program — tied to an internal initiative called Project Starfish — pulls product information like names, prices, and images from public brand websites and displays them in Amazon search results. Clicking the listing sends shoppers to the brand’s site to complete the purchase.
Amazon says the goal is simple: expand product discovery and help shoppers find items that aren’t currently sold inside the marketplace. But the rollout has angered some independent retailers who say they were never asked to participate and only discovered their products on Amazon after customers began placing orders.
In some cases, sellers reported incorrect product information, outdated inventory listings, or mismatched images appearing on Amazon — which they say can damage brand trust and create customer confusion.
This initiative is part of Amazon’s broader Starfish strategy, which aims to make Amazon the ultimate source of product information for everything sold online, scraping and mapping product data from hundreds of thousands of brand websites.
If successful, the move would transform Amazon from a marketplace into something closer to a global product search engine.
Seller takeaway:
Amazon isn’t just competing for transactions anymore. It’s trying to control the entire discovery layer of ecommerce — even for products it doesn’t sell.
For brands, that means Amazon search results may soon include your products whether you participate in the marketplace or not.
