As sellers make their final preparations for the 2023 holiday season, we take an in-depth look at the current trends across various marketplaces and web stores, based on data from eDesk. The good news is that while sales across the industry grew by 17% in October, there are significant differences for small versus mid-market and larger sellers.
This benchmark data reviews year on year sales and service activities of online sellers across 45,000 marketplaces and webstores supported by eDesk. The data is based on analysis of the same cohort of sellers in October 2023 versus October 2022.
All sellers
- Sales revenue up +17% year on year
- Order volume up +8%
- Customer queries up +27%
- Orders generating queries up from 13% to 16% (1 in every 6 orders)
The good news is that across the board, sellers are seeing strong sales activity leading into the critical holiday season. Both sales revenues (+17%) and order volumes (+8%) are up year on year, with sellers generally able to achieve higher order values, driven in part with better cross-sell and bundling strategies.
However, eDesk are seeing customer expectations on the experiences offered by sellers rising steadily. The number of queries per order has increased by 17% from one in every 8 orders to 1 in every 6 orders now giving rise to a customer service query. Sellers need to do a better job of managing increasing volumes of queries to ensure they don’t restrict their ability to scale.
The data from eDesk shows significant variances between smaller sellers and larger-scale operators.
Smaller sellers (< $20m GMV)
- Sales revenue up +2% year on year
- Order volume down -5%
- Customer queries up +35%
- Orders generating queries up from 16% (1 query for every 6 orders) to 25% (1 in every 4 orders)
These smaller sellers are experiencing the toughest year with sales and orders relatively flat year on year. However, customer expectations are rising most sharply for this segment, with the volume of customer queries per orders increasing from 1 in every 6 orders to 1 in every 4 orders generating a query. Smaller sellers are having to work harder to maintain their current sales volumes.
Mid-market sellers ( $20-$100m GMV)
- Sales revenue up +30% year on year
- Order volume up +21%
- Customer queries up +22%
- Orders generating queries flat year on year at 8% (1 in 12)
Mid-market sellers represent the fastest growing segment, experiencing strong growth in both sales revenue (+30%) and order volume (+21%). A key driver of this growth is the diversification into even more marketplaces. On average these sellers expanded into an additional 4 marketplaces over, lifting the average from 20 to 24 channels per seller.
Larger sellers ($100m+ GMV)
- Sales revenue up +25% year on year
- Order volume up +34%
- Customer queries down -7%
- Orders generating queries down from 16% to 11% (1 in 9)
The largest sellers are mostly likely to be set up for success, given their larger scale. However, while they have seen the highest year on year growth in order volume (+34%), sales revenue has lagged behind slightly (+25%), indicating greater competition combined with increased price consciousness amongst consumers. These organizations are also more effectively managing customer expectations, with fewer queries per order, down from 16% to just 11% of orders now generating queries.
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
