Amazon’s reach may be much bigger than anyone thinks, according to new original reporting by USA Today, and that could mean very big things for the shape of retail in the United States to come. Amazon’s yearly sales represent about 15 percent of total online sales among consumers in the U.S., according to Amazon’s filings with the Commerce Department.
But the Seattle eCommerce company may actually be handling double that amount — 20–30 percent of all U.S. retail goods sold online — given all the transactions it manages for its marketplace merchants, activity that does not show up directly in Amazon’s revenue tracking.
“The punchline is that Amazon’s twice as big as people give them credit for, because there’s this iceberg under the surface, but you only see the tip,” said Scot Wingo, executive chairman of ChannelAdvisor, an eCommerce software company that works with thousands of online sellers.
Once the marketplace sellers are added to the math, Amazon’s share of what U.S. shoppers spend online could be as high as $125 billion yearly. And according to Gene Munster, an analyst at Piper Jaffray, that 30 percent Amazon holds now is like more of a beginning than an end.
“Amazon’s just going to slowly grab more and more of your wallet,” he said.
So, how big is it really, and how big can it get?
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Josh Olson, an analyst with Edward Jones, estimated Amazon’s involvement in all U.S. online sales at 31.3 percent as of today.
“If you look at what they’re actually touching in terms of merchandise, it’s really significant,” he said.
Any estimates involve some guesswork since Amazon is notoriously close-lipped about internal operations. One Moody’s analyst, Charles O’Shea, noted that Amazon is bigger than its financials make it appear but doesn’t think it’s possible to accurately gauge exactly how much bigger.
“I don’t think there’s reliable data out there,” he said.
