Many sellers rely on Amazon as not only a marketplace, but also as a fulfillment partner. Fulfillment by Amazon, or FBA, is a program which offers warehousing and order fulfillment services for an extra fee. This makes it much easier for sellers to offer fast shipping and also makes their products available under Amazon Prime for free shipping. Furthermore many international sellers use FBA to offer the same shipping guarantees as local retailers.

Last week we explored how many sellers are selling on Amazon; Amazon USA has 185,000 active sellers. This week we wanted to look at how many of those sellers are using FBA. In our estimates we consider any seller using FBA for at least half of their products. There are more sellers trying out FBA for a small selection of their products, but these sellers below have made a commitment to use it for most if not all of their products.

30% of Amazon USA sellers use FBA - that’s over 55,000 sellers. We also checked if this ratio changes when we only consider top sellers, and it does. Almost 50% of top 10,000 sellers use FBA.

It’s interesting that in Europe, where all marketplaces are closely connected, Amazon Germany and Amazon UK have a much lower use compared to both Amazon Spain and Amazon Italy. We couldn’t come up with any reason why it would be so, but our best bet that there are more reliable and affordable local shipping companies available in Germany and UK.

Launched in September 2006, Fulfillment by Amazon has been around for 10 years. In Japan it wasn’t until 2008 that the FBA program was launched, but today Japan has the highest use of it.

We noticed that across all marketplaces this ratio is slowly growing every day as more sellers join the FBA program. We will come back to this in the future to see how much has the FBA usage grown.