There are close to 3 million active sellers on Amazon marketplaces worldwide, an increase of 17.7% in a year, according to Marketplace Pulse research. A seller is active if they have products listed for sale.
Less than 10% of the active sellers were able to achieve $100,000 in yearly sales, and only 1% reached $1 million in sales. Such is the nature of the Amazon marketplace, which exhibits the Marketplaces Power Law, the observation that a large portion of transactions is generated by a small fraction of the sellers’ population.
In the US, the Amazon marketplace has 1.1 million active sellers. Despite an additional 250,000 sellers who joined this year, the marketplace is growing the slowest in terms of active sellers at just 5.1%. Many of the new sellers replace old sellers as they get suspended or stop selling, and some of the new sellers stop without ever making a sale. Nonetheless, the Amazon marketplace in the US is four times larger than the UK one, the second largest.
The three other major markets for Amazon - UK, Germany, and Japan - are all growing at a similar rate of 17-19%. India follows with 21.3% growth. There was a significant increase of active sellers in Spain and Italy, as well as Mexico and Canada. Both being a result of a deliberate push by Amazon to enable European sellers to sell in all five EU marketplaces, and North-America sellers to be active in the three available marketplaces there as well.
| Marketplace | Active Sellers | Growth Since Last Year |
|---|---|---|
| USA | 1,114,388 | 54,388 (+5.1%) |
| UK | 281,257 | 43,727 (+18.4%) |
| Germany | 244,425 | 36,425 (+17.5%) |
| Italy | 216,610 | 51,110 (+30.9%) |
| France | 211,859 | 47,859 (+29.2%) |
| India | 205,884 | 36,184 (+21.3%) |
| Spain | 203,413 | 52,063 (+34.4%) |
| Japan | 173,483 | 28,303 (+19.5%) |
| Canada | 163,595 | 35,555 (+27.8%) |
| Mexico | 51,087 | 17,357 (+51.5%) |
| Australia | 24,227 | 5,587 (+30.0%) |
| UAE | 20,842 | |
| Brazil | 15,605 | 8,335 (+114.6%) |
| Turkey | 5,987 | 1,967 (+48.9%) |
| Singapore | 1,721 | |
| 2,934,383 | 441,423 (+17.7%) |
Amazon’s response on October 11th to US Congress’ antitrust inquiry included, for the first time, the number of active sellers. According to the letter, there are 898,000 active sellers in the US, counting sellers with gross merchandise sales greater than zero in the trailing twelve months.
The company’s response breaks down active sellers to 384,000 individual sellers and 514,000 professional sellers. Professional sellers pay a $39.99 monthly subscription fee; individual sellers pay $0.99 per item sold on top of standard fees. The individual plan is designed for small sellers who intend to sell fewer than 40 items per month.
Marketplace Pulse active sellers estimate uses a different definition - Amazon counts sellers with sales in the past year, Marketplace Pulse counts sellers with products currently for sale - but the figures disagree by only 20%. There are 2.4 million active sellers with gross merchandise sales greater than zero in the trailing twelve months, according to Marketplace Pulse research, versus 2.9 million active sellers with products listed for sale.
