Who Really Leads in Global E-Commerce Sales

Hamburg, Germany, October 17, 2014 (Newswire.com) - During the prolonged anticipation and recent aftermath of the biggest tech world IPO, Alibaba Group Holding was a star of the global business and E-Commerce news, and was often referred to as the largest E-Commerce company worldwide. 

The global top ten includes B2C E-Commerce companies and E-Commerce marketplaces. By far the largest company worldwide in terms of E-Commerce revenues generated in 2013 was Amazon.com Inc. Amazon’s USD 74 billion sales of products and services is greater than the combined revenues of the other nine ranked companies.

In second place with USD 11 billion sales is Chinese B2C E-Commerce merchant JD.com Inc., which went public this year ahead of Alibaba. American retailer Wal-Mart and online pure play company eBay rank next. German multichannel merchant Otto Group makes the last place in the top 5 with USD 8 billion sales.

Alibaba is number six with USD 4 billion of E-Commerce revenues excluding wholesale. Ranking below are the E-Commerce subsidiary of the French Group Casino Cnova, UK groceries retailer Tesco, Japanese E-Commerce giant Rakuten and another US-based merchant Best Buy.

When considering companies that have their business primarily in the marketplace segment, of this top 10, eBay Inc. is number one by E-Commerce marketplace revenues, which total more than that of Alibaba and Rakuten combined.

As for Alibaba, by revenues generated from retail marketplaces, which reached over USD 4 billion in 2013, it is number six in the top ten. However, in terms of growth, Alibaba outpaces all its competitors in the top 10, more than doubling the revenues from retail marketplaces last year. JD.com Inc. ranks next with close to +70%. Among the E-Commerce marketplace companies in the top ten, Alibaba had by far the largest gross merchandise value.

Finally, the ranking revealed the top five companies in terms of purely B2C E-Commerce revenues. By this criterion, the ranking is topped by Amazon with over USD 60 billion B2C E-Commerce sales of goods, followed by JD.com with over 10 billion and then by Wal-Mart, the Otto Group and Tesco.