One might assume Amazon is the world’s largest e-commerce marketplace and you’d be wrong according to a new report by Digital Commerce 360.
While $2.03 trillion was spent globally on the top 100 online marketplaces in 2019, Amazon managed to come in third with $339 billion (+25.3%) in 2019 sales, exceeded by Alibaba and its Tmall.com ($472 billion, +19%) and Taobao ($538 billion, +19% ). JD.com was fourth at $295 billion (+23.9%) and eBay fifth with ($90.2 billion -0.5%) .
The 100 largest e-commerce marketplaces together control 95% of global sales. Sixty of the largest marketplaces are in the US followed by Asia (17), Europe(15), South America (4) and Middle East/Africa (4).
Global e-commerce growth
Overall global digital sales grew 22% and accounted for 58% of all online retail sales. E-commerce is gaining momentum everywhere.
The top five marketplaces had sales between $50 and more than $100 billion, 28 earned sales between$1-$50 billion while 25 showed sales between $250 million-$1 billion, 24 generated between $40-$250 million, and 18 earned between $1-$40 million.
Marketplaces are still a relatively recent phenomenon with 50 of the top 100 launching since 2013.
US marketplace leaders
In addition to Amazon and eBay, the others in the five largest marketplaces include Walmart ($45 billion), mass merchandiser Wish ($10 billion) and home design site Houzz ($9 billion).
The data from 59 of the 60 US marketplace sites also provided interesting insight:
- $552 billion in sales in 2019
- 37% of sales were mobile
- average commission charged to merchants was 11%
- 38 of the US sites shipped internationally.
US e-commerce did well in 2019 showing overall growth of 18.2% and 26.9% without including Amazon and eBay data.
You can get further insight into the global e-commerce marketplace at the Digital Commerce 360 website which provided data visuals