More than 2,000 new sellers are joining the Amazon marketplace every day. This growth is invisible to shoppers but confirms Amazon’s role as the go-to platform for entrepreneurs.
According to Marketplace Pulse research, Amazon has added nearly 5 million sellers since 2018. Roughly 40% of them joined the marketplace in the U.S., and the rest — one of the twenty international marketplaces (sellers selling on multiple marketplaces were counted once). Brazil, one of those international markets, is one of Amazon’s fastest-growing marketplaces in traffic and, therefore, unsurprisingly, also in terms of the number of sellers.
The scale of the marketplace is invisible to shoppers because they rarely look at all the products on the first search results page, let alone page two and beyond. Amazon is long past growing sales by growing the seller base and, thus, assortment. Sellers instead add to the pool that competes for the limited selection consumers ultimately see. The goods they sell, the traffic they bring to Amazon, and their marketing generate impact.
The top 1% of sellers are critical. They’ve been selling on Amazon for years and drive at least half of the sales volume. The thousands that join daily don’t have the same experience, buy-in, and long-term view. So, while the absence of any individual seller would go mostly unnoticed by shoppers, the top sellers are more important than the influx of often fly-by-night sellers. Many new sellers never get a single order, but at least 35% do. They replace sellers who have stopped selling; thus, the marketplace is perpetually churning and expanding.
Sellers continue to flock to Amazon despite the registration process undergoing multiple evolutions, changes to fees, the competitive landscape evolving, and new alternatives launching. There is no sense that the business model is getting less popular or that sellers see less opportunity — a byproduct of Amazon’s market share in many of its markets.
