The Race for the World’s Top Marketplace

Chinese tech giant Alibaba clearly dominates the world of online marketplaces. Even U.S. high-flyer Amazon cannot compete in terms of GMV. Asia is a region in which marketplaces traditionally dominate the eCommerce field and huge populations have an enormous GMV potential. According to the ecommerceDB.com report “Top 100 online marketplaces in 2020: a global in-depth analysis”, 66% of the cumulated GMV produced by the 100 biggest marketplaces in the world can be attributed to players that are active in Asia. It is thus no wonder that Asia’s biggest online marketplaces Taobao and Tmall – both run by tech giant Alibaba – lead the ranking of the top 5 online marketplaces worldwide by GMV, before Amazon, JD and Ebay.1 Taken together, Taobao and Tmall generated more than twice the GMV amount of Amazon and almost three times the total GMV of JD.com in 2020. But how do the two marketplaces compare with each other? How have they developed over the years and what is there future going to look like? A comparison by ecommerceDB.com:

As mentioned above, Taobao is traditionally the strongest marketplace by Alibaba in terms of total GMV and still the leader in the global marketplace ranking in 2020. A closer look at the GMV development of the two “brothers” however reveals that Tmall – the younger B2B spin-off launched in 2008 – has slowly been closing the GMV gap on its C2C sibling Taobao, which has been online since 2003. While in 2014, Taobao still produced twice the GMV amount of Tmall – CNY1.6 trillion vs. CNY0.8 trillion – the margin has become smaller each year, with the two marketplaces only being CNY200 billion apart in 2020. In other words, Taobao only produced around 5% more in GMV in 2020 than Tmall. According to ecommerceDB.com forecasts, Tmall is going to overtake Taobao in terms of total GMV in 2021 and likely to extend its lead in 2022. The top global online marketplace for the current year is thus likely to be Alibaba’s younger B2B platform Tmall.

You want to find out more about the landscape of online marketplaces on a global scale or broken down to a certain region? Check out ecommerceDB.com’s brand-new marketplace section and find global and regional rankings, comprehensive information on total GMV, growth, regional scope and many more details on more than 100 online marketplaces in the world.

1: as of March 2021