Insight / Blog
Amazon and eBay represent 40% of UK eCommerce
Analysis from Ascential shows that Amazon and eBay had a combined gross merchandise value (GMV) of $39.77bn in 2019, for a total market share of 39.9%. Amazon actually increased its share since 2018, up 1.3% to 30.1% of the market.
Interestingly, Amazon’s ‘first-party’ retail where it is the merchant of record represents less than half of its total GMV, just 42% – the majority of sales value comes from its marketplace merchants. Of course, for eBay the figure for marketplace merchants is 100% as eBay does not sell products itself. An impressive 29.53% of total UK ecommerce is from third party merchants on marketplaces like eBay, Amazon and Alibaba.
As ecommerce continues to grow and take share from bricks-and-mortar retail, the dominance of these marketplaces and importance of their third-party sellers will continue to grow. Thanks to their market position, marketplaces like Amazon and eBay and platforms like Shopify which process a significant amount of ecommerce revenue are looking to add or improve fulfilment and delivery offerings.
In our Trends 2020 discussion, Doddle CEO Tim Robinson had this to say about the increasing role of marketplaces and platforms in fulfilment and delivery:
“Of course, Amazon has led the way when it comes to marketplaces and ecommerce players flexing their muscles in fulfilment with ‘Fulfilled by Amazon’ but it’s hardly alone. eBay and Shopify both announced plans in the space this year, and eBay have particularly been working their merchant base to adopt best practices in terms of delivery times and return propositions.
Right now, delivery and return options on marketplaces and platforms (e.g. Shopify, BigCommerce et al) are still various and inconsistent, which makes for a confusing customer journey. The availability of pickup/dropoff access for collecting and returning parcels is also patchy – expect to see the biggest players make strides in these areas this year.”
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