1. Half the Market

In recent years, more and more Chinese sellers have surged into the top tier of Amazon's US site, gradually seizing market share from local sellers.

According to the latest data from Marketplace Pulse, among the top 10,000 sellers on Amazon US, Chinese sellers now account for 55.9%, up 13.4 percentage points from 2020, while US-based sellers' share has fallen to 40.5%.

Over six years, leveraging advantages like rapid supply chain response and agile operations, Chinese sellers have transformed from followers into the majority on the leaderboard, and most of the new top sellers each year hail from China.

But this lead in numbers has not translated into an equal sales advantage. In the same top 10,000 list, US sellers, though only 40.5% of the total, contributed 65.3% of the GMV.

And the higher you go up the pyramid, the wider the gap. Among the top 100 sellers, US sellers account for 81.4% and capture 93.2% of sales. It's fair to say the platform's most profitable core remains largely in the hands of local sellers.

At the same time, not only is the top structure hard to shake, the mobility of the entire top seller list keeps decreasing. Data shows 68.6% of the top 10,000 sellers were already on the list a year ago. The moats of veteran players are growing thicker, making it much harder for new sellers to break into the top ranks and gain a foothold.

Simply put, Chinese sellers dominate in numbers, while US sellers pocket the lion's share of profits. Though the leaderboard seems to change every year, the true upper echelon remains very stable.

2. Accelerating Reshuffling

This trend of top-tier consolidation is not unique to the US site but a broad shift across the Amazon ecosystem.

Looking at the global marketplace, the pace of new seller entry has slowed notably in the past two years. In 2025, only 165,000 new sellers joined Amazon globally, a sharp drop of nearly 40% from 2024, marking the lowest in almost a decade.

Not only are fewer newcomers joining, the total number of active sellers is also shrinking, from 2.4 million in 2021 to 1.65 million by the end of 2025.

In contrast to the shrinking total, the scale of top players continues to swell. There are now 100,000 sellers with annual revenue of a million dollars, and 235 mega-sellers with over $100 million, both substantial increases over a few years ago. The shrinking and expanding paint a picture: those leaving are mostly small and medium sellers with weaker risk resilience.

A closer look at the composition of these top sellers shows that over 60% of the highest-revenue sellers entered before 2019. These entrenched veterans firmly occupy the top spots, and the leaderboard’s mobility continues to weaken.

This consolidation is driven by multiple factors. For instance, platform algorithms consistently favor established brands and older stores, making it hard for new sellers to gain sufficient organic traffic during cold start.

Meanwhile, advertising and logistics costs have been rising year by year, coupled with tariff fluctuations and tighter compliance requirements, pushing the overall operating threshold higher. Newcomers lack accumulated algorithm weight and sufficient capital to survive the initial phase, naturally making it ever harder to gain a foothold.

In this platform-wide divergence and reshuffling, Chinese and US sellers have followed two completely different development paths based on their respective resource advantages.

Chinese sellers excel at leveraging supply chain efficiency, using multi-store operations, rapid iteration, and low-price volume scaling to capture market share, allowing them to quickly conquer the mid-tier. However, they mostly concentrate in mid-to-low ticket standardized product segments, and brand building remains insufficient in the long run.

US-based sellers, on the other hand, rely on understanding of local consumption and years of brand trust to occupy high-ticket categories, capitalizing on word-of-mouth to command top-tier premiums. This barrier is hard to breach through short-term price wars.

Understanding these path differences, it becomes clear that Chinese sellers wanting to escape the rat race of low-price competition can no longer rely solely on opening more stores, flooding SKU listings to chase rankings; they must gradually upgrade toward higher value.

Category-wise, expand from low-price commodity items to high-ticket, strong repurchase categories; operationally, shift from a broad-stocking approach to deep cultivation of individual stores while polishing brand reputation; in layout, complement localized services like local warehouses and local customer support to shorten the distance with consumers, gradually squeezing into higher-value tiers.

Surpassing in numbers is only a phased achievement. From “occupying seats” to “capturing profits,” from mid-tier scuffles to top-tier competition, the branding upgrade journey for Chinese sellers has just crossed the first threshold.

Source: E-commerce Pai
Original link: https://www.pai.com.cn/p/01kx5qy1qhh754qhavjfva1ep