Online marketplaces - statistics & facts

Online marketplace heavyweights

The two U.S.-based e-commerce giants may still have the upper hand, but new competitors are measuring up. This is the case of two third-party marketplaces owned by online commerce company Alibaba. Although focused exclusively on the Chinese market, TaoBao and Tmall were the world’s leading online marketplaces based on gross merchandise volume (GMV) in 2020, with roughly 600 billion U.S. dollars each. Similarly, a homegrown player has taken the Latin American market by storm. With an expected compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of approximately 66 percent between 2019 and 2021, Mercado Libre is among the fastest-growing online marketplaces globally.

A new dawn for traditional retailers?

Looking at the growing reach of e-commerce, brick-and-mortar stores have also started to offer their e-retail platforms to third-party sellers. Walmart, for instance, launched its own online marketplace in 2009. After several years without much novelty, the bet started to pay off. In July 2021, America’s largest retailer surpassed 100,000 sellers in its marketplace, nearly three times more than before the COVID-19 pandemic. By the second half of 2021, Walmart was the third most visited online marketplace in the United States, while its competitor Target ranked fifth, just behind Etsy.

Etsy: standing out in a crowded field

Faced with an increasingly competitive landscape, some e-commerce companies have opted for a different business model. Instead of offering everything for everyone, Etsy focuses on filling the niche of handmade and vintage items. This online C2C/B2C retail platform has built much of its success on providing customers with a more personalized shopping experience than mass merchandise sales. Fueled by the coronavirus pandemic, Etsy saw its total number of active buyers grow by 77 percent in 2020, reaching a record 81.9 million.

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