Marketplace sellers have experienced a bumper start to the 2023 holiday season with GMV growth up 33% over the Black Friday Cyber Monday weekend, according to new data released by eDesk.
Analysing like-for-like order and service data from sellers operating across more than 45,000 marketplace and webstore channels for the period of Friday to Monday last week, eDesk is reporting year on year growth across all seller segments in 2023. Sales revenue in the period was up by 33% overall, with some market segments performing better than others:
- Smaller sellers, with annual GMV of less than $20m, saw year on year growth of 17%.
- Larger sellers, with annual revenues between $20-$100m were the big winners with revenue growth of just over 50%, when compared to Black Friday weekend last year.
- Sellers with annual GMV of greater than $100m collectively experienced a 38% increase in sales this year.
The GMV growth is accounted for by a combination of increased order volumes for marketplace sellers, up by 16%; and increased average order value, up by 15% year on year. Sellers in the $20-100m GMV bracket experienced the biggest increase in order volume which grew by 29% compared with last year. Coupled with a 16% increase in average order value, these mid-market sellers are the real winners in 2023.
eDesk specializes in helping sellers better manage customer relationships across their marketplace and branded web stores channels. While an increase in sales generally leads to increases in customer queries, eDesk is reporting a growing proportion of orders resulting in customer queries for some sellers. This year, customer queries were up 22% overall, representing an increase of 6% in the number of orders giving rise to queries.
- Larger sellers actually experienced a drop of 22% in the volume of queries per order, resulting from better expectation management and increased use of automation to deflect customer queries from support teams.
- Smaller organisations, with revenues less than $20m experienced an increase of 20% in the volume of orders generating queries.
Speaking about the results, eDesk’s founder and CEO, Ray Nolan referenced channel expansion as a key driver of revenue growth for the fast-growing mid-market segment.
We’re seeing rapid expansion into more marketplace channels by mid-market sellers who are diversifying their routes to market. Those with revenues between $20m and $100m have increased their channel mix most. We’ve seen the volumes of channels being serviced by these sellers increasing by 20% on average in 2023. Typically they are selling on more than 20 channels. We are definitely in the era of the marketplace. We’re seeing the strongest growth amongst sellers operating on niche marketplaces such as ManoMano, BOL.com and those enabled by Mirakl such as B&Q, Decathlon and Debenhams.
– Ray Nolan, CEO, eDesk
eDesk
eDesk provides a comprehensive customer support help desk for eCommerce. eDesk’s AI-powered customer service software is used to support customer queries across more than 45,000 online stores and marketplaces globally.
Uniquely, eDesk enables online sellers to consolidate query, order and customer data in a single smart inbox; from where you can more effectively support customers with the full power of next generation AI.
With eDesk, merchants can reduce the chaos associated with selling and managing customers across multiple channels; so that you can free up time and focus on scaling your business profitably. To find out more, visit eDesk.com
