How does Amazon Fashion stack up with brands and opportunities?
There’s enormous room to grow private label apparel offerings. Nike is the most listed brand on the site, and Amazon’s heavy dependence on third-party sellers reflects “challenges in striking supply deals with brands.”
Those are some of the key findings in a new study “Amazon Apparel: Who’s Selling What?” by Coresight Research, formerly called Fung Global Retail & Technology, in collaboration with DataWeave.
The study of Amazon apparel in the U.S. analyzes nearly one million listings and spotlights Amazon’s private label sales, statistics on apparel sales by third-party vendors, and the hottest and most listed brands and categories, among other data.
Among the most interesting findings:
• Amazon Fashion offers 881,269 clothing products across 2,798 brands in women’s and men’s wear.
• Just 13.7 percent of clothing products on the site are sold by Amazon itself; 86.3 percent are listed by third-party sellers.
• Amazon’s focus with first-party clothing inventory is on higher-value categories.
• There are only 834 Amazon private-label products on the site, representing 0.1 percent of the entire offering.
• Nike is the most-listed brand on Amazon Fashion, with 16,764 products in women’s and men’s wear.
• Lower-price brands such as Gildan and Hanes rank high in terms of number of products listed.
• Casualwear and activewear are most prevalent on the site, with women’s tops and T-shirts the most-listed classifications on Amazon Fashion, with 138,001 products listed. Men’s shirts, marked by “an abundance of casual shirts as well as polo shirts and some T-shirts” ranks second, with 109,043 products listed.
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Coresight Research, headed by Deborah Weinswig, founder and chief executive officer, indicates that Amazon’s venture into apparel is “one of the hottest topics in retail.”
“We think the retailer’s reliance on third-party sellers underscores its opportunity to grow apparel sales by bringing more inventory in-house,” Weinswig writes. “If Amazon held more first-party clothing inventory, it would mean that more products would be eligible for Prime delivery, boosting the appeal of such items among Prime members.
“We think that shoppers feel greater reassurance on issues such as product authenticity, shipping and returns charges, and returns policies when they buy direct from Amazon than when they buy from [often-unknown] third-party sellers. And findings from our recent consumer survey support this: 38 percent of Amazon apparel shoppers surveyed said they prefer to buy directly from Amazon rather than from third-party sellers on the site. Moreover, greater first-party inventory would imply a strengthening of relationships between Amazon and brands — in other words, brands would be more willing to sell to Amazon Fashion if the company itself, rather than third parties, sold their products on the site.”
Weinswig also indicated that Amazon’s Lark & Ro brand is “by far the biggest of Amazon’s apparel private labels, as measured by number of items.…Lark & Ro is heavily skewed toward dresses.”
Amazon Fashion’s Top 10 Brands By Number of Products Listed
1. Nike — 16,764
2. Interstate Apparel — 16,743
3. Next Level — 15,426
4. Gildan — 14,085
5. Calvin Klein — 13,623
6. Hanes — 12,854
7. Sport-Tek — 12,149
8. Port Authority — 10,831
9. ZeroGravitee — 9,331
10. Adidas — 8,579
Source: DataWeave/Coresight Research