We are living in an amazing time. Technology is growing by leaps and bounds and offering us more of an opportunity to be successful each day. Most people think small and don’t understand. I don’t say that to belittle their intelligence but rather to point out that 99% of people think of what directly affects them and little else. Reading posts through some of the groups only verifies it but I doubt many people see it, it actually seems that more people agree with those thoughts and agree. So I want to try and bring some perspective into what this business is and what our part of it is in the grand scheme.
There are 482 million listings on Amazon, of course there are many duplicates but there are probably far more OOS listings to offset that. Then count in the over 300,000 new products being brought to market each year. Hundreds of millions of items to sell or market, tens of millions of proven items on Amazon.
So the idea that some people can’t find 10 or 20 items to sell is not for a lack of availability but rather a short coming of their own and of course people don’t like to blame themselves.
New sellers are coming in everyday and for some reason people think that this is flooding the market. Amazon alone did about $89 billion in sales last year. And out of the $89 billion and 100’s of millions of products to choose from, people worry that the new sellers are going to come in and take a bite out of the $80k in annual sales as if there were not room for any more people. This thinking is because they can’t see past their own sales and what directly affects them. There are over 2 million 3rd party sellers on Amazon, the idea that a few thousand more are going to ruin everything seems kind of silly.
So let’s put some of this into perspective. You as a seller on Amazon are competing with 2 million other sellers to find profitable items out of the hundreds of millions of available listings, not even counting that you can create your own to add something new.
And you as a seller are trying to get a small piece of the roughly $89 billion dollars in sales that Amazon will be doing this year. That $89 billion compared to the $22 trillion dollars in worldwide e-commerce this past year. In comparison, Alibaba has about $250 billion in sales the past year. If Amazon’s $89 billion is huge to you, then the $250 billion must seem gigantic for a company. Unless you look at regular retailers like Walmart who will probably be doubling that and be around $500 billion in sales this year.
You need to put into perspective that being an Amazon seller is being a very small fish in a very small pond. I don’t care if you’re doing a million dollars a year in sales, in the overall scheme that is a very small seller. It’s important to understand how small Amazon is in the scope of things so that you can understand the potential.
Right now the United States makes up about 10% of the world’s internet users. And you think to yourself that the internet is huge, has hundreds of millions of users and millions of websites. It does seem huge until you take into account a couple facts.
1.) Google accounts for roughly 40% of all internet traffic. I checked that claim and it looks like that stat came from some internet monitor that showed all internet traffic dropped 40% when google went down for a couple minutes last year and the traffic increased back up by 50% went they went back up. The second stat that puts the first one into perspective and gives it the wow factor is
2.) Google has indexed and uses 0.004% of the internet's total size.
That’s right, even with everything we see with online content we do not use 1% of the internet’s capability.
So there is room for expanding beyond our wildest imaginations. There is room for Amazon to increase it’s 25% market share of the US e-commerce retail market. There is room for online sales to increase it’s 10% share of all retail sales in the US. There is room to increase the already hundreds of millions of products available on Amazon. We are at the beginning people.
And we’re also at the beginning of technology whether you believe that or not. The first iPhone was launched just 8 years ago. The first iPad 5 years ago. 10 years ago there were not even flip phones yet, no mobile internet service, your phone made calls and could send texts, that was it. That’s right, that was before most people had even heard of Wi-Fi. Mobile apps didn’t exist. And 7 years ago Amazon was 1/5 the size in sales volume than it is today.
According to the census records in 2010 (yes, just 5 years ago) only 76% of households had a computer and only 71% had internet service. I’m telling you that online merchants are still in their infancy and while they have been there for quite a few years it’s not until these last few that it’s really started to get going. Every year we hear that UPS, FedEx and USPS had problems keeping up with the volume of packages, every year they increase their workforce and try to anticipate the needs of the season, and every year it grows beyond what they anticipated and what they can keep up with.
There is so much potential for growth and that leaves a ton of potential room for sellers to expand. It’s growing faster now than ever, it’s going to keep growing, and we are all in for one hell of a ride!
So next time you see the negative comments about how things are going downhill, how the market is getting saturated, how all these negative things are happening I want you to remember that their perspective isn’t looking past their own problem at the moment. They are too narrowly focused to see past their own mistakes and faults. And most important, that’s when you realize that your potential has no limits and make the decision not to let anything they say deter you from what you know is possible.
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