Understanding eCommerce Marketplaces

The Major Global eCommerce Marketplace Players

There are many ecommerce marketplaces globally, and while not an exhaustive list, you can explore these U.S.  eCommerce Marketplace business service providers available as overseas sales channel options as part of your digital strategy. The major global ecommerce marketplaces you may be familiar with include: Amazon (US-based retail); Jing-Dong/JD (China-based retail); Alibaba (China-based retail); Rakuten (Japan-based retail), and Pin Duoduo (China-based agricultural retail).

The end of the pandemic-driven surge of market capitalization by mid 2022 saw the major ecommerce marketplace players reassess their strategy and spend. As a result of the Impact of COVID Pandemic on eCommerce, many large ecommerce players are now moving towards the higher profit margins of the advertising services business themselves.

How International Consumers Use eCommerce Marketplaces 

China leads the way in using ecommerce as a sales channel, largely driven by consumer shopping followed by Germany, the United Kingdom, US, and France.

Consumers the world over prefer going to ecommerce marketplaces for product research for a variety of reasons: 

1. Consumers like the ability to search many products by type;
2. Given the dominance of the larger ecommerce marketplaces and their reputation for service, consumer confidence in these sites is high; 
3. Consumers prefer a consistent customer service experience which ecommerce marketplaces can provide;

A close second to marketplaces, search engines like Google also factor high with consumers as a product research tool, so make sure your website has been optimized for search engines.  

In the graphs above, we see China’s Taobao and Tmall leading in gross merchandise value, yet we also see Amazon leading in popularity by percentage of visits. This could mean that with more visitors and less gross merchandise value (GMV) for Amazon, consumers could be using the Amazon marketplace for product research before buying elsewhere for various reasons to include pricing and individual country shipping restrictions. 

This assumption can be further supported by the graph above where we can see by country where ecommerce purchases are made. China is the main country that other countries buy online from, to include the US.  The countries that that mostly make purchases online from US businesses and marketplaces are South Korea, Canada, Mexico, Argentina, and India in order by share.