The U.S. is Amazon’s least competitive marketplace. Despite having the highest number of sellers, they each receive more traffic per seller than on the other marketplaces.
According to Marketplace Pulse research, each active seller on Amazon in the U.S. receives more traffic than sellers on Amazon’s smaller marketplaces. For example, in the U.K., sellers receive half the traffic. In Canada, they receive a quarter. Monthly visits per seller are the total visits divided by the number of active sellers.
Thus, while Amazon’s marketplaces outside of the U.S. have fewer third-party sellers, they are not necessarily less competitive - they have fewer shoppers too. In other words, a smaller set of sellers is sharing an even smaller number of shoppers.
The U.S., Japan, and Germany in the top five are not surprising. They are Amazon’s most important markets - in that order. Turkey and Brazil are significantly smaller, but they also don’t have that many sellers. On the other hand, Amazon’s marketplaces in Europe - Spain, France, and Italy - have many sellers because of pan-European selling despite not having that many shoppers. Singapore, The Netherlands, Sweden, and Poland are most competitive due to Amazon launching them recently and failing to carve out market share in the countries.
The picture is incomplete without considering the demand size. Even though Brazil and Turkey appear great in terms of the size of the competition, they are orders of magnitude smaller than Amazon in the U.S. That renders them poor opportunities for anyone, except perhaps local sellers.
That’s why the Amazon marketplace in the U.S. is not saturated - it is both a massive shopping destination and has favorable competition levels. Every year, a new cohort of sellers finds opportunities on it. It is getting more complex and capital-intensive to be successful, however. More sellers unquestionably make succeeding more challenging, but they are sharing a bigger pie.
By this competitiveness definition, Walmart and Target are even greater opportunities. Especially Target, which is as big as Amazon in Canada traffic-wise but only has hundreds of sellers. Although on Walmart and Target, first-party sales capture a higher share of sales than on Amazon.
The U.S. is responsible for roughly half of the total traffic on all Amazon marketplaces. It also transacts more than half of the total GMV. Its marketplace has the most sellers, but that doesn’t make Amazon’s other marketplaces less competitive. That’s because they often have a lot fewer buyers than they have fewer sellers.
