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That’s why Amazon.com has gone to great lengths to eliminate AI-generated and paid reviews from its marketplace, says Ben Donovan, lead analyst at e-commerce analysis firm Marketplace Pulse. The company has booted several electronics retailers because they were paying for fake reviews, despite their having annual sales in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

Most online marketplaces are designed to give priority to items that are “good enough and cheap, rather than good enough and premium,” says Donovan. His research suggests that Amazon’s algorithm bumps up cheaper items that are selling in higher volumes, as opposed to more expensive ones that sell more slowly.

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Chinese sellers may need a new playbook to stay competitive on foreign marketplaces as the US and other countries move to tighten de minimis exemptions that once gave them an edge over domestic sellers.

That shift could have a significant impact on Amazon and other platforms, given that Chinese sellers account for more than half of Amazon’s global active seller base, according to Marketplace Pulse.

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That makes Amazon more than a retailer. It makes it one of the most valuable advertising platforms in the world. According to Marketplace Pulse, advertisers spent over $50 billion last year to reach shoppers on Amazon’s site, and that money flows right onto Amazon’s income statement.

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Walmart continues to grow its online marketplace business. The retailer has more than 200,000 active sellers and has added 44,000 sellers in the past few months, according to Marketplace Pulse, a data analysis firm.

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If left unchecked, a platform’s “take” impedes growth, as we are seeing today. Last year, Amazon charged private sellers, on average, between 50 and 60 percent of their sales in fees, according to the research firm Marketplace Pulse.

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In 2024, Walmart launched its Multichannel Solutions program that allows sellers to use WFS to fulfill orders from any e-commerce site, including Amazon, eBay, Shein and Temu, via Walmart’s supply chain. According to Marketplace Pulse research from 2024, more than 50% of Walmart sellers also sell on Amazon. Last year, the company also launched cross-border fulfillment, so it can handle transportation of inbound goods from ports of origin in Asia directly to WFS facilities in the U.S.

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The new features come at a time when selling on Amazon has only gotten tougher. According to Marketplace Pulse, the number of active sellers has fallen from more than 2.4 million in 2021 to under 1.9 million this year, even as Amazon continues to attract nearly a million new sign-ups annually. That contraction means there’s now 31% more traffic per seller than four years ago, but it also reflects the difficulty of staying active in a marketplace where Amazon’s fees eat up more than half of many merchants’ revenue.

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Shares in the Lehi, Utah-based company closed Friday at $15.63 apiece in New York, above the IPO price of $14, compared to a marketed range of $13 to $15. The trading gives the company a market value of about $2.75 billion, based on the outstanding shares. The company ranks second in the US on Amazon’s marketplace, according to data compiled by Marketplace Pulse based on the number of reviews sellers received in the past 30 days

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Between 2019 and 2024, the number of sellers on Walmart’s marketplace grew more than 900%, according to estimates from Marketplace Pulse, which collects data on leading e-commerce platforms.

Marketplace Pulse estimates Amazon had 21 times the number of sellers that Walmart had at the end of 2024.

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The Utah-based company was founded by husband-and-wife duo David Wright and Melanie Alder in 2013 as iServe Products before it changed its name to Pattern in 2019. Pattern currently ranks as the No. 2 Amazon seller in the U.S., based on the number of customer reviews, according to research firm Marketplace Pulse.

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On the merchant side, Walmart has been beefing up its marketplace strategy as a serious competitor to Amazon. Walmart Marketplace now hosts over 200,000 active sellers, with some 44,000 new merchants joining in the first five months of 2025 alone — that’s nearly matching all of 2024’s growth in just a third of the time, per Marketplace Pulse. Walmart now lists more than 420 million products online — as many as 95% of them come from third-party sellers, according to Marketplace Pulse.

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Ben Donovan, insights lead at Marketplace Pulse, said the announcement was “one of the more significant” steps Amazon has taken in years to support brands. “It signals a continued shift away from resellers towards brand owners,” Donovan said. “It is certainly becoming a tougher environment for resellers on Amazon.”

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The marketplace surpassed 200,000 active sellers for the first time this year, according to data from Marketplace Pulse.

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Pattern ranks second in the US on Amazon.com’s marketplace, according to data compiled by Marketplace Pulse based on the number of reviews sellers received in the past 30 days.

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Walmart is also following in Amazon’s footsteps by growing its third-party seller platform, a move that broadens the variety of products it offers to consumers. And it’s scaling that marketplace much faster than Target, according to e-commerce intelligence firm Marketplace Pulse.

Last October, Target’s third-party seller platform, called Target Plus, had just 1,325 sellers, according to Marketplace Pulse. The e-commerce research firm reported that Walmart’s marketplace had more than 200,000 active sellers as of June 2025.

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Analysts at Baird Equity Research have previously forecasted that Amazon Business could top $80 billion in sales volume by 2025. Marketplace Pulse, the e-commerce intelligence firm, has put forth similarly lofty projections. “Given that the market of business-to-business buying is larger than the consumer one and that little of it is digitized, Amazon Business will likely surpass $100 billion in the next five years,” Marketplace Pulse founder Juozas Kaziukėnas wrote in 2021.

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Walmart Inc., Target Corp., TikTok Shop, Best Buy Co. and Kohl’s Corp. all ran competing sales this year — often beginning earlier and extending longer than Prime Day, according to e-commerce intelligence company Marketplace Pulse.

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“The idea that two thirds of the millions of products on Walmart’s site could be produced in America is just a fantasy,” says Ben Donovan, an analyst with Marketplace Pulse, which tracks e-commerce data.

Learning from Amazon, Walmart also opened its e-commerce platform to international sellers in 2021. Four years later, China-based vendors account for one-third of the 200,000 active sellers on Walmart’s online marketplace. “A third-party marketplace alleviates a lot of those pressures because the responsibility of tariffs is not on Walmart, but on the third-party seller,” Donovan says.

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While Amazon takes the lead in general merchandise purchases, accounting for some 73% of gross merchandise value, Walmart is catching up. Speaking at a recent Oppenheimer investor conference, CFO John David Rainey shared that about half of its GMV growth in general merchandise has been from its marketplace business.

Overall Walmart’s marketplace revenues grew 34% in the last fiscal year and Marketplace Pulse estimates there are 150,000 sellers on the platform.

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Citing comments from Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, Donovan explained that US sellers sourcing from Chinese manufacturers often have to deal with intermediary suppliers, whereas Chinese firms are selling directly to US consumers, and so have “a significantly lower baseline” when it comes to cost.

The backdrop for this situation, he added, is that Chinese sellers have steadily gained market share on Amazon’s marketplace, surpassing the 50% threshold in January as US sellers fell to about 45%, per a report from Marketplace Pulse.

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