27% of German ecommerce generated on Amazon

About 27 percent of German ecommerce sales are generated on Amazon Germany. This can be calculated after some marketplace sales data from Amazon sellers leaked.

In an email sent to some of its marketplace sellers yesterday, Amazon Germany revealed – probably unintentionally – some previously unknown details about the marketplace sales of Amazon.de, the German version of Amazon. And with that information some conclusions can be drawn with regards to the total turnover of Amazon Germany’s marketplace sellers.

With the mail, a calculation can be made

According to the mail, on Amazon.de a marketplace gross revenue of approximately 10.25 billion euros is generated. This number was previously kept top secret by Amazon and stems from information found in the letter, combined with Jeff Bezos’ recent letter to shareholders. (Hats off to Intern World for making the calculation!)

Two months ago, Bezos announced that 58 percent of Amazon’s merchandise sales would be generated by marketplace merchants. And with total sales of 277 billion dollars in 2018, that would translate into worldwide marketplace sales of 160 billion dollars.

Amazon.com 7x more sales than Amazon.de

And in yesterday’s mail to its sellers, Amazon Germany promotes sales on Amazon with the following arguments: “Amazon.com is Amazon’s largest marketplace in the world: 50 percent of Amazon’s revenue is generated on Amazon.com and Amazon.com generates revenue that’s seven times as big as it does on Amazon.de, with just half as many merchants.”

So, if you take 50 percent of the worldwide marketplace sales of 160 billion dollars, announced by Bezos, then you get marketplace sales on Amazon.com being worth 80 billion dollars. And if you divide that number by 7, you’ll get about 11.47 billion dollars – or 10.25 billion euros – worth of gross sales for the marketplace sales at Amazon Germany.

‘Lower than expected’

And that number is actually lower than many experts in the German ecommerce industry had expected from Amazon. For example, t3n suspected Amazon to generate sales worth over 18 billion euros, while Carpathia estimated it would be worth about 14.5 billion euros.