Only 2.4% of the top 10,000 sellers on the Amazon.com marketplace started selling during the past 12 months. Other sellers have been selling for a few years. Here is the breakdown by rank range:

Top 10 – 0%
Top 100 – 0%
Top 1,000 – 1%
Top 10,000 – 2.4%
Top 100,000 – 21.4%

Simply put, 240 sellers joined the Amazon.com marketplace, and were able to grow enough to get into the top during the last 12 months.

Internationally other Amazon marketplaces are more often to change, with roughly 15% new sellers in the top in the UK, Germany, and Japan. Others, like France, Spain, and Italy, are at close to 30%, as the influx of established sellers expand internationally.

Amazon marketplace has a relatively low churn rate. The churn rate, also known as the rate of attrition, is the percentage of sellers on a marketplace who stop selling within a given time period. 67% of the top 10,000 sellers today were also in the top 10,000 a year ago. Furthermore, 50% of those top sellers today were in top 10,000 two years ago.

Despite the increasing competition, growth of private labeling, changes to selling and FBA fees, etc. it is impressive that half of the today’s top sellers were also top sellers two years ago.

Even though thousands of new sellers joining Amazon every day - 180,000 new sellers joined during the first two months of this year - this has little impact to the top sellers. Out of the hundreds of thousands of new sellers on Amazon.com last year only 15% received a seller feedback review recently.

The takeaway is two-fold: new sellers do not immediately break out in to the top, and top sellers are able to stay in the top for years