Attention! Amazon's most popular "blood sea" category in 2025 is exposed!

As we approach 2025, when everyone starts to enter the product selection stage and discusses which categories are suitable, some "negative examples" are usually mentioned. For those fiercely competitive "red ocean" or even "bloody ocean" categories, sellers who are preparing to enter the cross-border e-commerce market are advised to avoid them.

Today I will mainly talk about the two biggest sales categories during Black Friday and even this year: clothing and beauty !

In fact, these two categories have never left the altar of "the most popular categories"! If something is not popular in China, you must believe that it is not popular abroad either.

This is not nonsense. A research report shows that in 2024, sellers in the beauty category will account for 26%, and sellers in the clothing category will account for 20%. Among them, the clothing category will provide more than 10 million products in total!

How can we not be competitive when the seller saturation is so high? Then how can we be competitive? Let’s take a look at the data below!

Recently, eMarket released the survey results of discount data during this year's Black Friday after surveying more than 5,000 cross-border sellers. The results are as follows:

★ Clothing category – average discount is 32.9%

★ Furniture category——the average discount is 25.3%

★ Beauty category——the average discount is 22.4%.

Another piece of data once again proves the "king of volume" status of this category! A set of advertising data on global e-commerce websites released by GoodsFox (the full version can be obtained by scanning the QR code at the end of the article to add customer service~)

The data is based on the statistics of the number of advertising materials in media delivery channels from October 13 to November 11 this year , and analyzes the delivery performance of beauty and personal care, clothing, health care and other categories, as well as the hot items and advertising material characteristics of different categories during Black Friday and Cyber ​​Monday. The top three are:

★ Clothing category, advertising accounted for 13.6% (ranked second)

★ Beauty and cosmetics category, advertising accounted for 19.3% (ranked first)

★ Health care category, advertising accounted for 9.5% (ranked third)

Looking at the prices of the popular lists of these two categories in the research data, the average price of the beauty category is around 40-50, and the price of the clothing category is less than 100 !

Big discounts + large advertising budgets, when these two data are combined, the most popular categories this year must be clothing and beauty !

But at the same time, these two categories are also what we often call the "Black Sea" category——

This category has a very troublesome problem - return rate. On Amazon, there are many clothing products with a return rate of 50% or even 60%. Because of the color, style, size and other characteristics involved, there will be a large number of variants, a huge number of SKUs, and a huge inventory pressure.

There is another factor that sellers need to consider more - profit.

Amazon previously reduced commissions for clothing categories, which seemed to be a concession, but it sacrificed the sellers’ net profit. Amazon intends to control the price of products with a current price of around $25 to 19.99, and the price of products with a current price of around $20 to 14.99.

When your profit drops by 30%, your profit will be insufficient to cover expenses or even enter a period of micro-profit due to such high advertising costs and refund rates. It may be good news for those whose prices are currently stuck at 16-18 or 22-23, but if everyone lowers their prices, it is equivalent to no one lowering their prices.

Although the profits in the beauty category seem good, it is often difficult for new sellers to make significant profits due to the monopoly of large sellers and fierce market competition.

The market competition is very fierce and the brand effect is strong, especially in popular product categories, the top 10 or top 20 products are often occupied by a few large sellers.

In addition, this category needs to meet strict quality and safety standards and undergo frequent certification and audits, which increases the complexity of operations. Due to regulatory issues, products may be frequently removed from the platform, which places high demands on sellers' inventory management and market response speed.

The generally high return rates for these two categories of products are not limited to individual sellers, but are a common problem for the entire category.

At the same time, operating such products requires a keen insight into fashion and the ability to grasp popular elements in Europe and the United States, as well as a strong supply chain relationship to support the coordination of all links from design, proofing to payment period.

The profit margin is low, so if you don’t have certain industry experience and qualifications, you should be cautious when entering this category. If you are selecting products for 2025, you must pay attention to the above two categories and products!