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Walmart online assortment has over 42 million products, but only 3.5 million products are sold by Walmart. The rest are by one of the over 20,000 marketplace sellers.

"Can a restaurant succeed if it's delivery-only?" asked Neal Ungerleider of Fast Company. Well, can a retailer succeed if it's marketplace-only?

When it comes to Amazon its moat is wide and deep: Prime memberships, AWS cloud hosting, etc. But probably the most under-appreciated moat is the marketplace and its impact to competing retailers.

Starting this summer Facebook has started to quietly expand the Facebook Marketplace to include businesses selling retail products. According to our research it has already surpassed the first 150 sellers.

Unbeknownst to many Google is building an e-commerce marketplace. According to our research Google's shopping platform recently surpassed 500 stores. Most of which it added in the last four months.

Amazon is the third largest advertising platform, behind Facebook and Google. Facebook and Google together account for more than half of the overall online advertising market in the US, but Amazon advertising is growing six times faster than the incumbents.

Achieving nationwide free two-day shipping is hard and expensive. Even Walmart can't do it perfectly - customers on the west cost have access to 20% less products with two-day shipping available than customers on the east cost.

It took less than a year for the Amazon marketplace to grow by one more million new sellers. That's 3,398 new sellers every day, or 141 every hour, or more than 2 every minute. Unsurprisingly, most of the new sellers are based in China.

Walmart has grown the catalog and has built the marketplace, the challenge now is to offer free nationwide two-day shipping. Amazon has made its Prime program the gold standard for all other online retailers. For Walmart too.

Three reasons why Amazon got into the bed-in-a-box business: "mattress" is the 42nd most searched term on Amazon, best selling mattresses on Amazon are brandless, mattress as a product is hard to differentiate on.