The World’s Top Online Marketplaces – Besedo (2024)

Find out which online marketplaces are the biggest in various countries, categories, and much more in our definitive list of marketplaces worldwide.

There are various advantages of selling products on the best-rated marketplaces as a seller. With so many visitors, Amazon has significant benefits as an online market when you choose to sell on the internet. The established audience is one of the biggest reasons you should trade in online markets. Suppose you are a seller who is just getting started selling online. In that case, marketplaces can be a fantastic way to earn some income and establish your brand while working on driving traffic to a new e-commerce site.

Just how big are the biggest marketplaces in the world?

What is an online marketplace?

First of all, we need to understand what defines an online marketplace. It boils down to two key features:

1. Sellers and buyers are trading through the same website (or app).
2. The buyer can complete their purchase on the website (or app).

This excludes price comparison sites like PriceRunner or Google Shopping. They are essentially advertising channels rather than online marketplaces.

The buyers are mainly consumers, not businesses. The marketplace sells physical products, not just downloads, streaming, or other services.

We start with approximately 200 marketplaces with more than one million monthly visits. Then we look at the most popular product categories and the break-out stats for a few countries.

In short, we are looking at actual online marketplaces where you can sell physical products to consumers. This is user-generated content at its finest, folks!

The world’s top online marketplaces

All these marketplaces sell goods under a general category, and all except one (Amazon) are pure marketplaces without any retail operations. All these marketplaces sell general goods except Zalando, Etsy, and Wayfair.

Only Amazon and eBay break the one billion visits mark. However, Rakuten and Mercado Libre aren’t too far behind, with over 500 million per month. And Zalando is hot on their heels with 420 million visits per month.

Amazon is the most well-known retailer to have its marketplace, with more than 50% of sales now made through Marketplace sellers. In addition, the biggest players in online furniture marketplaces, Wayfair and Amazon, account for 63% of furniture sales online.

US-based e-commerce giant Amazon, the top-ranked e-commerce company worldwide by market capitalization, is the third-largest online furniture market. Amazon.com is the most visited e-commerce marketplace, with an average of over 2.3 billion monthly visits.

If you merge the visits to the biggest Amazon domains, the visits are almost 5 billion per month.

It is not surprising to see Amazon and eBay among the top three; eBay receives 1.2 billion monthly visits. Suppose you add up Amazon, eBay, and Etsy. In that case, you are looking at 500 million+ monthly active visitors, an enormous amount of real estate on the internet.

How did the pandemic change our online adoption rate?

According to a study by McKinsey, COVID-19 has pushed companies over the technology tipping point–and transformed business forever. Digital adoption has taken a quantum leap at both the organizational and industry levels. Of course, this affects our consumer behavior on marketplaces worldwide.

Markets in Europe

The most popular European market is Amazon, which gets 1.6B visits per month. At the same time, eBay receives less than half that traffic, at 634M visits.

Another American-based, general-purpose global marketplace, eBay, received 255 million monthly visits in the United Kingdom.

With these impressive numbers, eBay is the only marketplace that comes anywhere near matching Amazon’s numbers in the UK for visitors.

Amazon is the largest market in the US, with over 300 million customers on Amazon, 100 million of whom are Prime members. The best-known online marketplace is also Amazon, thanks to Amazon’s strong delivery and fulfillment capabilities and its seamless shopping experience.

Walmart offers various categories of products that draw many visitors every month, making it one of the leading online markets in 2022.

Since the rise of the titans such as Amazon, eBay, and Alibaba, brands have been racing to thrive, compete, or get beat in the online markets. Companies like Walmart added marketplaces to their existing retailers’ websites, giving shoppers more product choices while creating price competition among sellers. Of these major online markets, three are in China, and two are based in the U.S., the two biggest drivers of e-commerce sales growth.

The same is true for the sales from online retailers, which are expected to also increase significantly over the next few years.

There are also niche online markets such as Bonanza, Fruugo, and Hollar, fashion-focused markets like Zalando and Fullbeauty, and deal-focused markets such as Tophatter and Tanga – the list goes on.

European consumers are using the greatest number of different marketplaces – 63 have more than one million visits per month, generating more than 3.6 billion visits.

Let’s have a look in-depth at some categories.

Fashion online marketplaces

Clothing and fashion are one of the most popular online marketplaces niches. Popularized by many influencers online, the fashion and clothing industry has really found its market on popular apps like TikTok and Instagram.

Fashion marketplaces are spread worldwide, with Europe, the USA, and India in the top 5 spots.

Electronics online marketplaces

A surprise inclusion on this list, for anyone outside of the USA, is probably Offerup in 3rd place on this list.

Electronics are typically commodities – easily available and extremely price-sensitive.

Travel and tourism

Travel and tourism are irrelevant when we only look at physical goods. But just for comparison, we thought we’d have a look at the top 10. Booking.com is three times bigger than the runner-up Tripadvisor. Booking is also bigger than Tripadvisor, Airbnb, Expedia, Uber, and Jalan (positions 2–6) combined.

Top online marketplaces by country and region

North American consumers generate the most traffic to online marketplaces, with little more than 4.5 billion visits per month and more than 50 different marketplaces having one million or more visits each.

Europe is the runner-up with the highest number of marketplaces, with over one million monthly visits.

The third is East Asia, and that is primarily China and Japan, with an estimated 2.7 billion visits.

Online marketplaces by country

Breaking down the top online marketplaces by country. This is a little trickier because we can’t find data for many countries, so this is for the United States and the United Kingdom.

United States

United Kingdom

About the data

Based on SimilarWeb and Statista data for April 2022, the lists are ranked by estimated website visits. Please note that traffic to different domains for the same marketplace (amazon.com, amazon.de, amazon.jp, etc.) has been combined. It’s regarded that Gross Merchandise Value might be an ideal measure of size, but that data is not available for most marketplaces.

Due to the lack of reliable traffic data from the sources, we have not included app-only marketplaces.