Around the Ecommerce world in 5 mins!

Ecommerce is changing everyday, and sometimes by the minute. So many new ideas and developments everyday, becomes hard to keep track.

We bring to you a curated digest of ecommerce developments/happenings around the world, compiled from various publications across the Internet.

Amazon increases capacity in the US

Amazon is increasing its capacity to deliver in the USA by a rate of knots. They’ve just announced the opening of three new Fulfilment Centres this month alone. That comes on top of the 26 US Fulfilment Centres they opened in 2016. The new 1.2m sq ft premises in Maryland will employ 700. It’s about an hour from Philadelphia and Baltimore in a town called North East.

Australian Online Retailers Need to be Extra Vigilant

Thirty-nine of the world’s top 250 retailers now operate in Australia, up two from last year. Australian retailers are warned to be extra vigilant, with international retailers set to enter our retail market further in 2017, according to Deloitte’s 2016 Global Powers of Retailing report.

China’s Alibaba reports a 54% increase in revenue in Q3

Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. reported a 54% year-over-year increase in revenue in its fiscal third quarter ended Dec. 31 as China’s mostly mobile shoppers continued to flock to its giant online marketplaces, Taobao and Tmall. A highlight of the quarter was the $17.4 billion worth of purchases on Alibaba’s shopping portals on Nov. 11, the annual Singles’ Day online shopping extravaganza in China, with 82% of purchases coming from mobile devices.

Amazon undercharged for four months and will send new bills for the balance

We’ve seen a copy of an email from Amazon suggesting that between 8th of September 2016 and the 11th of January 2017 the wrong fees were charged for items sold in the Electronics Accessories Categories. Amazon’s Seller Referral Fees for that category should be 12%, but we understand they were incorrectly charged at just 7% for four months. Amazon have been billing the correct 12% from the 12th of January 2017. This means that sellers may have been undercharged by 5% on all their sales for four months and three days.

Chinese customers set the pace for global e-commerce – can you keep up?

A new report from Accenture and AliResearch, Alibaba Group’s research arm, forecasts that by 2020, more than 900 million people around the world will be international online shoppers, and the biggest market will be China. Over 200 million Chinese consumers are expected to be cross-border shopping within five years, with a transaction volume of imported goods purchased online reaching $245 billion.