Online marketplace GMV is highly concentrated

After the top player rankings in the online marketplace business from a European and a global perspective, the ecommerceDB.com news present to you today another exciting slide from the brand-new report “Top 100 online marketplaces in 2020: a global in-depth analysis”. Based on extensive analyses of company data and secondary sources, including complex bottom-up and top-down modeling techniques, ecommerceDB.com’s first ever report on online marketplaces features in-depth information on the top 100 global online B2C marketplaces, including KPI analyses and forecasts, rankings, store profiles, and insights into regional differences and category-specific characteristics. Taken together, the top 100 online marketplaces in the world as identified by ecommerceDB.com generated a GMV of more than US$2.1 trillion in 2019. A closer look at GMV¹ distribution reveals that the bulk of global marketplace GMV is centered around just a few players:

Worldwide marketplace GMV is highly concentrated around the top dogs – the gaps between the biggest players and the rest are huge. Alibaba’s online marketplaces are the biggest in the world: Taobao and Tmall generated a GMV of US$490.3 billion and US$463.5 billion, respectively. U.S. tech giant Amazon generated the third-highest marketplace GMV in 2019, namely US$397.2 billion. Taken together, these three market leaders are responsible for a share of 64% in total global online marketplace GMV in 2019 and therefore totally dwarf the rest. Ranks 4 to 100 – in other words a total 97 platforms – only generated about 37%² of total global marketplace GMV in 2019. The lower the rank, the less relevant the player in terms of GMV. While the second group – the 6 players in the ranks 4 to 10 – are still responsible for a 2019 GMV of US$547 billion or a share of 26% in global GMV, ranks 51 to 100 – a total of 50 marketplaces! – only contributed 1% to global online marketplace GMV in 2019.

You want to find out more about the world of online marketplaces? Check out the newly released ecommerceDB.com report “Top 100 online marketplaces in 2020: A global in-depth analysis” and get all the details you need for revealing the secrets behind the important eCommerce branch of online marketplaces.

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.

2: Sum exceeds 100% due to rounding

Visit our news area for additional content around the topic of eCommerce.

March 2021