Number of Amazon sellers supasses Ebay

According to information provided at the 2008 Amazon Seller Conference back in July 2008, there are 79 million active user accounts on Amazon. That’s a whole lot of buying going on. And, what continues to amaze me is that I’ve spoken with countless people who aren’t aware that they’re buying from individual merchants, not the ‘Amazon company’.

With over $14.9 in revenue in 2007, Amazon now has 1.4 million seller accounts. They’ve just surpassed Ebay that reportedly has 1.3 million. These numbers were reported at the conference and also confirmed in an article published by TheStreet.com, which states that worldwide active seller accounts were up 14% in 2008, as compared to 11 percent in 2007.

In an analyst note, Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster estimated that Amazon has sold $6 billion in goods by third parties in the last 12 months. That tally is still well behind eBay’s $62 billion worth of goods via third parties, but Amazon is poaching market share.

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Amazon is the Walmart of the Web

No doubt about it, Amazon is the Walmart of the online retail space. They grew 38% this year up from $10B to $14.8B in the last year. Few companies outside of Walmart in the ’80′s have seen this kind of growth. Amazon built on it’s mix with books, cds, dvds, and is continually perfecting it’s model. Now they’re getting into office supplies.

Why? Interestingly, 3 of the top 10 eRetailers are office supply stores (Staples, Office Max and Office Depot).  Crazy. The Web accounts for 37% of all office supply sales. So basically, when you go to an office supply store you’re walking through a future graveyard.

According to the publisher of InternetRetailer, the other large segments are all up for grabs. The chain stores are coming back online with renewed seriousness, but their not going to dominate the business sectors. In fact, the chains are growing at the slowest rate, 18% overall vs. catalogers which grew 33%. Pure plays came in at 22%, and branded manufactures at 22%.

Walmart is starting to heavily invest resources into their online business. They grew grew 25% last year, but on much smaller base than Amazon. So far overall online retail sales are down 11% for 1st Q’08. We shall see!