The past year has seen Amazon active seller growth of 25% to a total of 1.16 million on their EU marketplaces, according to data released by Marketplace Pulse. Worldwide, Amazon active seller growth was 17.7% to a touch under 3 million sellers (2,934,383) meaning that the EU is one of the most competitive territories Amazon operate in – in total more than the 1,114,388 active sellers in the US.
An Amazon active seller is defined as one who has products listed for sale.
The UK is the EU country with the greatest Amazon active seller count – 281,257, an increase of 18.40%, followed by Germany (244,425), Italy (216,610, France (211,859), Spain (203,413), and Turkey (5,987).
The UK growth of 18.4% was actually the second slowest growth of Amazon active sellers after Germany (17.5%). Countries which grew faster include Italy (30.90%), France (29.20%), Spain (34.40%) and Turkey (48.90%). The growth in Turkey is no surprise as this is one of Amazon’s newest territories.
What is also interesting is that the average Amazon active seller has relatively small turnover. Only 10% of Amazon sellers worldwide turn over more than $100,000 and less than 1% have a turnover that exceeds $1,000,000 on an annual basis.
There are also a large number of Amazon active sellers with zero sales in the past year. Amazon don’t generally release much data concerning their seller numbers, but in an October letter to Congress they were forced to reveal a few details one of which was that there were 898,000 sellers in the US who had made at least one sale in the past 12 months. This means that there are over 200,000 sellers with active listings in the US who didn’t achieve a single sale!
This data gives sellers a yard stick to measure themselves against to judge their importance to the Amazon marketplace and perhaps in turn determine how much support Amazon might be willing to give them. If you’re turning over more than $1 million (about £774,000) then you are in the top 1% of sellers worldwide. If your Amazon turnover exceeds $100,000 (about £77,000) then you are one of Amazon’s top 10% of sellers.
On the face of things, it doesn’t appear that you need to be that large a business to be in the top 10% of Amazon sellers worldwide – £77,000 is just under £6,500 per month Amazon turnover and that is a figure achievable by many small businesses. If you’re not achieving this level of turnover than this offers a goal for 2020 – grow your business to become one of the elite top 10% of Amazon sellers worldwide.
6 Responses
Online transactions are very small in terms of all retail transactions. As the worldwide shift moves from bricks and mortar to online then sellers will see major growth in online sales.
Quite not at the £774,000 level yet, but way. more than £77,000 🙂 Which probably places me in top 3 to 5%. Last two weeks have been amazing and Q4 will finish at £100k+ in sales, which is amazing.
£6,500 per month in sales is really not that difficult to achieve, which simply means that 90% of Amazon sellers don’t have a real business or at least a business that can support them on a full-time basis (very hard to do that on a turnover of just £6,500, as profit will most likely be in the 10 to 20% region, at best).
But it’s crazy to understand how many people actually do sell on Amazon. Almost 3 million – that’s a small country when you think about it! Obviously, being an Amazon seller myself, an increase of sellers is no good news for me, lol
I have seen with my own eyes a vast number of people who use ebay, amazon, etsy etc as a side hustle, happy to earn some extra pocket money alongside their full time job. This would be a large contributing factor to the fact that there a 1000’s of sellers but only 1% $1m + sellers. Another reason why the popular categories are so competitive = not lots of people making money, just simply lots of people taking market share.
Just wanted to point out that Turkey is not in the EU
I’m firmly in the 1% club and get absolutely zero support from Amazon. No account manager, no UK based call centre, just the same old seller support everyone else gets! Would be interested to know if anyone else in the 1% club gets preferential treatment?