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The Year in Review looks at the state of marketplaces and their challenges, and makes predictions on what’s to come next year. It’s a deep-dive report built on our research, highlighting more than twenty different metrics and the context surrounding them.

More than ten thousand Chinese sellers are attending the 4th annual Amazon Global Store Seller Summit. Amazon's message in China is simple: innovate on great products, expand worldwide, and build brands. And it's working.

Amazon Australia is starting to gather momentum as it grows the marketplace, expands the catalog, and enables Prime shipping. They have 25,000 marketplace sellers, 100 million products, and have doubled website traffic.

The largest online retailer in the US is not Amazon, but the Amazon Marketplace. Made up of millions of sellers it will account for 31.3% of total e-commerce sales this year. It's close to twice as big as Amazon itself.

According to our research of the 800 million items on eBay, 18 million are available with 3-day guaranteed delivery, 8 million are available with 2-day guaranteed delivery, and close to 2 million are available with next day 1-day guaranteed delivery.

Amazon marketplace grew to a few hundred billions of dollars in size because brands refused to sell to Amazon directly. The future of Amazon is brands represented by Amazon, an Amazon agency, or by the brand itself. The opportunity for sellers is shrinking.

Wish is a mobile shopping app for customers whose first priority is low prices. The app sells a few billion dollars worth of products a year by enabling merchants to sell directly to consumers. According to our research 94% of the growing list of merchants are based in China.

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.