The best online marketplaces in the world 2021

Discover which online marketplaces dominate your countries, regions, and product categories in our definitive list of marketplaces around the world.

Worldwide, 47% of e-commerce sales were made through online marketplaces in 2020, amounting to nearly two trillion dollars. Given the drastic boost from the COVID-19 pandemic, it is expected to grow significantly over the next 5 years as more companies adopt marketplaces as the best platform to promote online sales.

We are well acquainted with companies like Amazon, eBay, Rakuten, and Alibaba, the giants of online retail, but who are the rising stars? Who are the other major players in the world? What are the best places to sell niche products?

In this post, we have compiled a definitive list of all online marketplaces around the world, and we answer those questions and more.

We start with 155 marketplaces that have over a million visits per month, then we analyze the most popular product categories and the best-served regions and countries. We include a detailed breakdown of the four main product categories (fashion, books, home goods, and electronics) and finally, we take a look at the top marketplaces by country and region.

 What is an online marketplace?

There are two key features that define an online marketplace:

1. There are many sellers and buyers operating through the same website.
2. Buyers can purchase products without leaving the site (or app).

This excludes price comparison sites like Shopping.com. Although they have products from many sellers, you cannot make a purchase without leaving the site. They are advertising channels rather than online marketplaces.

It also excludes sites where you sell used products directly to the company operating the site, like decluttr and ubup. Since you can only sell directly to the company, there is only one buyer. They are acquiring products from consumers to resell them themselves (often through online marketplaces!).

For this article, we have focused on marketplaces that meet two more criteria:

1. Buyers are primarily consumers, not businesses.
2. The marketplace sells physical products, not just downloads or digital services.

This means that marketplaces that only support business-to-business (B2B) trade, like the diamond trading site RapNet, are excluded. Marketplaces specialized in services like the freelance website Upwork are also excluded.

In summary, we are looking for true online marketplaces where you can sell physical products to consumers.

The best online marketplaces in the world

 

Estimated monthly visits for April 2021, from SimilarWeb. Traffic to different domains for the same market has been combined (for example, amazon.com, amazon.co.uk, amazon.de, etc.).

Key: Marketplace = marketplace and Retailer = retailer

It is no surprise that Amazon and eBay top the list, with Amazon attracting more than five billion visits per month and eBay with 1.7 billion.

You can find the largest sellers in these markets in our articles about the top Amazon sellers in the world and the top eBay sellers in the world. Mercado Libre from Latin America ranks third on the list, which may surprise many Westerners who have never heard of them before.

Only Amazon and eBay surpass the one billion visits mark, although Mercado Libre, Rakuten, and AliExpress are not far behind with over 500 million visits per month each.

Regarding product categories, the top 20 markets overwhelmingly sell general merchandise, and only three specialize in a specific product category. Etsy is the largest of these markets, highlighting the popularity of handmade and artisanal items. It is an incredibly solid niche, especially considering that competing markets sell mass-produced products like electronics and clothing.

In the top 20, there is a 40/60 split between markets that are retailers themselves and those that are just marketplaces. The most well-known retailer with its own marketplace is Amazon, where over 50% of sales are now made by marketplace sellers. But it also includes companies like Walmart, JD.com, and Target. These companies have added marketplaces to their existing retail websites, providing shoppers with a greater variety of products and creating price competition among sellers.

When it comes to geographic regions, there is a very diverse mix represented in the top 20. Four are global brands, but there are also markets in Japan, Latin America, China, North America, Southeast Asia, India, and Europe, all represented in the top 20.

It is important to note that this list is ranked according to estimated monthly visits to the website, using data from SimilarWeb. While GMV (gross merchandise value) would be an ideal measure of market size, this is not reliably available for most online markets. Traffic data provides a consistent measure of popularity that can be applied to all markets worldwide.

What has changed in 2021?

Two major markets closed during 2020:

• Jet.com was acquired by Walmart in 2016 and then closed in June 2020 when Walmart's own e-commerce operations, including its marketplace, enjoyed record growth.
• Zilingo, the Southeast Asian fashion marketplace, has become a B2B exclusive company.

Minor market closures included:

• GenMarket, the Brazilian division of Rakuten.
• ttHigo, which was Newegg's Chinese marketplace.
• Pixmania, a French electronics retailer that had been declining for several years.
• British craft marketplace oodlique.
• The U.S. marketplaces sell.com, Modnique, and uBid closed or changed their business models.

There were also a number of high-profile rebranding and company changes:

• Amazon launched websites in Sweden and Poland and renamed Souq in Saudi Arabia to Amazon.sa. The Egyptian Souq site continues to operate under the Souq brand.
  Real.de from Germany is now Kaufland.de.
• The Romanian online retail marketplace eMAG in Poland has been acquired by the local online retailer Morele.
• Launch of the used fashion marketplace Poshmark in Australia.
• Rakuten withdrew from the United States, Germany, Spain, and Brazil. It now operates only in Japan and Taiwan.