How big is Amazon´s Marketplace?

The large assortment is one of the keys to success in ecommerce, and it is certainly one of the strengths of Amazon. Getting a large catalogue is a very expensive job, as it involves spending thousands of hours both on the search for new products and on the platform. For this reason many ecommerce choose to create a marketplace within their platforms so that the sum of thousands of vendors allow them to be able to create an extensive catalogue.

Amazon is probably one of the largest marketplaces in the world, and what we are asking today is, how representative is the volume of your marketplace with respect to the total of your products? Obtaining an exact figure is practically impossible, as we speak of a retailer that in Spain only has over 200 million products.

Let us therefore do a study in just one of their categories to focus the analysis. The electronics category is one of the most popular in online sales, and also the most representative in Amazon, with a total of 35,684,660 products as of April 11, 2017. The previous figure includes both Amazon's own products as well as those sold by one of their merchants, but, what percentage represents those sold by Amazon?

If we filter the total number of electronic products by those that Amazon sells directly, we get the figure of "only" 576.957 products, and we say only in quotation marks because it is a very large volume only available to the largest retailers in the world, let’s remember that we are speaking only of one particular category. The really surprising thing is that of the total of products this amount hardly represents 1.62%, that is to say, 98.38% of the products are commercialized by third companies.

Amazon's marketplace not only represents a significant turnover for the American company, but also an immense sales laboratory from which to select the most profitable products and add the "sold by Amazon" sign to.