Top 5 Biggest Online Marketplaces in the World

March 10, 2021

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An eCommerce world without online marketplaces is unimaginable. The first online marketplaces used one of the most basic and earliest concepts of successful trade and reinvented it in an online context: The convenience of finding everything you need in one place. In the earliest times of trade, people went to their local markets to find different products from a variety of suppliers, to compare offers and prices, and to try out new products. In other words, markets evolved around a customer-centric approach of convenience, choice, and satisfaction of a broad range of needs. The concept of online marketplaces is in no way different. Customers appreciate the great variety of products from different origins in one place, and retailers value online marketplaces as a convenient new sales channel that helps them reach a broad range of clients. Consequently, online marketplaces as an eCommerce destination are booming. In 2019, online marketplaces were already responsible for 53% of global eCommerce sales, according to estimates by ecommerceDB.com. ecommerceDB.com presents today the top 5 global online marketplaces by GMV1 in 2019, an exclusive slide from the brand-new ecommerceDB.com report “Top 100 online marketplaces in 2020: a global in-depth analysis”:

The analysis from the report reveals a clear winner in terms of global online marketplace GMV. Chinese tech giant Alibaba dominates the global online marketplace world with two of its platforms in the lead: Taobao generated the highest GMV of all online marketplaces in 2019. Following a year-on-year growth of 4%, Taobao generated a GMV of US$490.3 billion. Alibaba’s B2C marketplace Tmall follows closely in second place, with a 2019 GMV of US$463.5 billion. “The everything store” Amazon comes in third, but already at quite a distance. Amazon generated a marketplace GMV of US$397.2 billion in 2019. With a year-on-year growth of 24%, however, Amazon grew fastest of all top 5 online marketplaces. Chinese JD.com is fourth in the ranking, with a 2019 GMV of US$301.9 billion. The old hat in the online marketplace space eBay registered a negative GMV growth between 2018 and 2019 but still makes it into the top 5, albeit at a great distance with a GMV of US$ 75.6 billion.

Are you interested in more exciting facts about the world of online marketplaces? ecommerceDB.com analyzed and processed company data, secondary sources, and other store-specific drivers of the world’s biggest B2C online marketplaces by GMV using complex top-down and bottom-up modeling techniques. The results have just been released in the first comprehensive ecommerceDB.com report on online marketplaces, featuring top 100 analyses, insights into categories and regional differences, and in-depth store profiles. Check out “Top 100 online marketplaces in 2020: a global in-depth analysis” for all the details!

1: GMV is defined as the sum of sales generated by a specific marketplace by both first- and third-party sellers across all brand domains. GMV generally includes VAT, shipping costs, commissions and service fees paid to the marketplace operator, and initiated but failed transactions and returns. However, the term GMV is not standardized and can therefore be interpreted and calculated in different ways.

 

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