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Ben Donovan, insights lead at Marketplace Pulse, characterized Shein’s acquisition of Everlane and the growth of its third-party marketplace as “two attempts at the same goal, but not necessarily two separate wins.”

“Shein built the marketplace to localize itself: bring in U.S. sellers, U.S. fulfillment and brands American shoppers recognize. It hasn’t delivered the brand side at any real scale,” Donovan said in an email. “So Shein bought a brand instead. Everlane hands Shein a U.S. identity and an older, higher-spending customer base that the marketplace was supposed to attract on its own.”

“The marketplace started as a way to widen selection,” Donovan said. “Post-de minimis, its more useful role is giving Shein a domestic-fulfillment channel that isn’t exposed to cross-border tariffs.”

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While Amazon remains the largest-selling channel for three brands he owns and where he spends the most on ads, Yale said that the products have now diversified to Walmart, The Home Depot, grocery stores and other channels.

According to Marketplace Pulse tracking data published last week, Amazon’s total active seller count dropped from 584,000 early last year to 500,000 as of last month. And fewer than 8,000 sellers generate more than half of Amazon’s third-party gross merchandise value. Three years ago, it took more than 15,000 sellers to account for half of US sales.

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As is the case with Nvidia and Palo Alto Networks, though, don't lose perspective here. As of last year, Amazon remained the e-commerce leader in the U.S. at 35.7%, according to Marketplace Pulse, and is still gaining share. And while Amazon is losing share in cloud computing, it's doing so in a rapidly growing business that will be around forever. AWS still managed to grow its top line by nearly 20% last year, driving almost 15% growth in its operating income.

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China-based sellers play a significant role in powering sales on Amazon’s website, representing roughly half of the e-commerce giant’s global active seller base, per Marketplace Pulse research published in September 2025.

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Despite US-China trade tensions, China remains the most important supply source for Amazon. Chinese sellers accounted for half of Amazon’s global active seller base last September, marking the highest share ever, according to data from Marketplace Pulse.

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The boycott is just the latest example of Amazon coming under scrutiny over the growing cost of selling on its platform.

Amazon’s average cut of each sale crossed 50% for the first time in 2022, according to Marketplace Pulse, a third-party market research firm, which cited a sample of sellers’ profit and loss statements.

Seller fees are part of the Federal Trade Commission’s antitrust lawsuit against Amazon, filed in September 2023 and scheduled for trial in 2027, which accuses the company of using anticompetitive tactics to maintain its e-commerce dominance, as well as stifling merchants on its marketplace.

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Advertising revenue, Amazon argues, allows it to keep other fees competitive while investing in seller tools and platform improvements.

But the numbers tell a story of escalating costs. According to Marketplace Pulse data, the average seller now spends 26% of revenue on Amazon-related fees - up from 19% in 2020. Advertising accounts for roughly 40% of that cost, making it the second-largest expense after Amazon's referral fees.

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By comparison, e-commerce sales generated $4.5 billion in the final three months of 1999. Since then, the industry has seen tremendous growth. It took 18 years for sales to pass $100 billion in a single three-month period, but then just seven years to pass $300 billion, according to the Census Bureau.

Amazon has the biggest share of online retail, capturing 35.7 percent of sales in 2025, according to e-commerce intelligence firm Marketplace Pulse.

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Currently, the research firm Marketplace Pulse estimates Temu has more than 100,000 merchants based in China that sell goods on its platform. Factories act as merchants and ship their products to Temu warehouses in China, which are then delivered directly to consumers in the U.S. and other countries.

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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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