Amazon: Where the World Shops

Founded 25 years ago in Jeff Bezos’ garage, the online retailer Amazon has experienced an incredibly successful growth and is one of today’s leading online retailers and global employer of approximately 648,500 staff members. With a large part of the world’s online population having shopped at Amazon in the last 12 months, the internet giant remains number one in terms of popularity in 2019. Comparing the respective countries, India ranks first with a share of 88%, followed by the UK and the USA (each at 86%) and Austria and Germany (each at 82%), closely followed by Italy with 81%. In Canada and France, Amazon is a little less popular – however, both countries account for a share of a 72% which is still a considerably large proportion of the respective populations. In view of these clear and large majorities, it becomes even more evident, that in Greater China, there is only a relatively small share of people who shop at Amazon – amounting to 23%. This figure, among other things, might result from the stiff competition Amazon has to face in this country – with the two online retail giants Alibaba and JD.com. Nevertheless, the data compiled speaks for itself: In 2019, a major part of the world’s online population shops at Amazon.

Looking at penetration and sales figures, one must keep in mind that it is not always Amazon itself, who you are buying the product from and who makes the (main) profit out of it. With Amazon Marketplace, third-party sellers are enabled to privately or commercially market both new and used products. For every purchase via this platform, Amazon charges up to 45% of commissions. The sales numbers for 2018 shown on this graphic do however only refer to first-party sales. Out of these selected countries, clearly, the U.S. is far ahead with US$74,738 million (taking into account the fact that it’s not exclusively US-Americans, shopping at amazon.com). When compared to the first graphic, it is striking that the sales numbers in Germany, the U.K., Japan and especially in France, seem rather low, and India isn’t even mentioned. An explanation for this may partly lie in the fact that in 2018, 58% of physical gross merchandise sales sold on Amazon were realized by third-party sellers via Amazon Marketplace. So, if 88% of the Indian onliners recently bought something on Amazon but India’s first-party sales numbers aren’t even worth mentioning, it seems likely that there must be a huge popularity of Amazon Marketplace in India. Regarding the before mentioned share of third-party sales in 2018, this development is presumably also taking place in other countries.