Thread by @AlecStapp

1/ Hal's analysis hinges on this claim that Amazon controls "nearly 70% of gross merchandise transacted across all US online platforms."

In fact, Amazon's share of US e-commerce (including both 1st party and 3rd party sales) is 38%.

Here's why the numbers are so different...

https://twitter.com/HalSinger/status/1253725826304086018

2/ Hal cites a report from Digital Commerce.

I followed the link, but there is no direct statistic for Amazon's share of the US ecommerce market.

Instead there is an infographic showing the five largest US e-commerce platforms.

3/ Here are the number from that infographic:

Amazon: $339b
eBay: $90b
Walmart: $49b
Wish: $10b
Houzz: $9b

339 / (339+90+49+10+9) = 68.21%

There's Hal's "nearly 70%" figure.

This is wrong wrong wrong for two reasons.

4/

First, those are GLOBAL gross merchandise transactions.

For US market share numbers (and antitrust analysis), you should only include US sales.

Second, this ignores the sales of every other marketplace platform not in the top 5.

5/ So what's the real number?

38%

According to eMarketer, which "estimates market share based on consumer spending, not Amazon revenue, so all the money shoppers spend on Amazon is counted toward its market share."

That's both 1st and 3rd party.

bloomberg.com/news/articles/…

6/ There's no need to manually calculate this number based on ambiguous numbers in an infographic.

Unless of course your argument depends on making Amazon's control of the US retail market seem larger than it actually is.