With much of the world taking to shopping on the internet in recent years, as evidenced by the global ecommerce sales growth, businesses need to have a presence on online marketplaces.

But just what are the top online marketplaces and their sales potential?

According to the latest data analyzing the 100 biggest online marketplaces of 2020, these marketplaces raked in $2.67 trillion in sales in 2020. This makes up 62 percent of the total online sales last year.

Spurred by the pivot to ecommerce, which analysts say was accelerated by five years as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, 2020’s sales from the world’s top ecommerce marketplaces marked a 29 percent annual increase. 

The majority of these sales took place on the top 100 marketplaces, which analysts say was responsible for more than 95 percent of the global marketplace sales. 

Interestingly, 52 of these marketplaces are located in the United States. 22 are located in Asia, 19 are in Europe, and the remaining seven are spread across Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa.

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Biggest Online Marketplaces: Top Five

Ranked by gross merchandise value (GMV), which is the total value of products sold, China’s Taobao tops the list of the biggest online marketplaces with a GMV of $609 billion.

This is followed by Tmall, short for Taobao Mall and also based in China, which sold $593 billion worth of goods in 2020.

Though they both have similar names, Tmall is actually a spin-off from Taobao. Unlike Taobao, which is a C2C (customer-to-customer) platform, Tmall is mostly considered to be B2C (business-to-customer).

US ecommerce giant Amazon, the top ecommerce company in the world in terms of market value, is the third biggest online marketplace. In 2020, the Jeff Bezos company’s GMV came in at $475 billion.

These top three marketplaces alone were responsible for almost two-thirds of the total amount of sales from online marketplaces in 2020.

In fourth place is another Chinese marketplace, JD.com. The Beijing-headquartered online retailer sold $405 billion of merchandise last year. Wrapping up the top five is eBay with $100 billion in GMV.

Of these top online marketplaces, three are based in China and two in the United States, which, incidentally, are also the two largest contributors of the growing ecommerce sales. 

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