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 to grow.

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

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Top online marketplaces in 2022

According to the latest data analyzing the 100 biggest online marketplaces of 2022, these marketplaces sold $3.25 trillion worth of merchandise last year, a 2.9% increase from the previous year. 

These online marketplace sales constitute 54% of global ecommerce. In other words, more than half of the total online sales in 2022 were from transactions that took place from these websites. The majority of these sales (77.5%) also came from third-party sellers operating on these platforms.

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Interestingly, more than half (51) of these marketplaces are located in North America. Another 22 are located in Europe and Asia is home to 16 of them. The remaining are spread across Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa.

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 $701 billion.

This is followed by Tmall, short for Taobao Mall and also based in China, which sold $663 billion worth of goods in 2022.

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, currently the top ecommerce company in the world in terms of market value, is the third biggest online marketplace. In 2022, its GMV came in at $368 billion.

Total sales from these top three marketplaces alone exceeded $1.7 trillion and were responsible for more than half (53.3%) of the total amount of sales from online marketplaces in 2022.

In fourth place is another Chinese marketplace, JD.com. The Beijing-headquartered online retailer sold $247 billion of merchandise last year. Wrapping up the top five is Shopee, with $78 billion in GMV.

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

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