Amazon recently launched Amazon Haul, a low-price shopping section, which saw its biggest success on Black Friday thanks to a massive 50% discount on all items.
The promotion, highlighted on the Amazon app, drew shoppers in large numbers. However, many items sold out quickly, and the momentum slowed over the weekend due to limited stock.
Key Highlights:
- Black Friday Boom: Amazon Haul gained traction on Black Friday, with 2,700 products becoming best-sellers in smaller categories like jewelry boxes and pepper mills.
- Stock Issues: Products, mostly sold by China-based third-party sellers, were shipped from warehouses in China. Many sold out because sellers underestimated demand, impacting Cyber Monday sales.
- Limited Success: Despite its strong start, Amazon Haul's sales remain small compared to competitors like Temu, a popular direct-from-China shopping platform.
Challenges for Amazon Haul:
- Competition with Temu: Amazon Haul has far fewer sellers and products compared to Temu, which boasts 500,000 sellers and heavily markets itself.
- Short-Lived Promotion: The 50% discount and app promotion have ended, causing demand to drop significantly.
Amazon Haul has begun running ads on Facebook and Instagram, but it’s unclear if this new section will sustain long-term growth or compete effectively with established platforms like Temu.
A scaled-down lookalike
On the surface, Amazon Haul looks like Temu, but in reality, it is a scaled-down version of Temu in terms of its number of sellers, catalog size, and category coverage. Marketplace Pulse research shows it has hundreds to Temu’s 500,000 sellers.
“Haul feels more like an algorithmically disorganized wholesale catalogue than the hyperpromotional “shop like a billionaire!” manipulation machines on which it’s based,” wrote John Herrman, a tech columnist at Intelligencer, in a report published on MarketplacePulse, a newsletter that follows Amazon.