The digital world keeps expanding as fertile ground for international commerce. It opens new ways to sell and to reach customers. In this first article of our Opportunities Series, the topic is marketplaces and their relationship to the fashion sector.
What is a marketplace
A marketplace describes a space where buyers and sellers come together to do business. The digital era added a new layer to that meaning. It now also refers to an online platform that hosts that same kind of transaction between many stores and many shoppers.
Picture a virtual shopping mall, to understand this format better. Dozens of stores sit side by side in that space, and any shopper can browse freely between brands and products. The experience feels safe and convenient. That is a marketplace.
This gathering of online stores makes it easier for a shopper to compare products. Prices become easier to check too. That is exactly why more consumers choose a marketplace as their first stop when shopping online.
How marketplaces work, with examples
You have almost certainly shopped on a marketplace already. Amazon, Walmart, eBay, and Etsy each run one, and together they define most of what American consumers think of as online shopping.
Global marketplace gross merchandise value is estimated at 3.8 trillion dollars in 2026. Marketplaces now account for 67 percent of all global ecommerce sales. In the US specifically, Amazon and Walmart together will account for just over half of all retail ecommerce this year. That is the first year the pair has crossed 50 percent, up from a combined 41.3 percent back in 2019. Amazon alone drives roughly 750 billion dollars in third party seller GMV. eBay follows at 74 billion, Walmart Marketplace at 65 billion, and Etsy at close to 15 billion.
A marketplace gives a new seller a way to launch a brand, among the clearest advantages. It builds recognition without building an audience from zero. For an established brand, a marketplace offers a way to diversify its customer base and grow revenue in a new segment.
Amazon, the dominant force
Amazon accounts for 37.6 percent of all US ecommerce sales. Walmart sits a distant second at 6.4 percent. More than 270 million Americans shop online today, close to 80 percent of the population. Product searches increasingly start on a marketplace rather than a search engine, with 63 percent doing so and 56 percent starting on Amazon specifically.
Amazon runs roughly 2.3 million active sellers worldwide. The average seller generates 250,000 dollars in annual revenue, though the top 10 percent of sellers account for 68 percent of total marketplace revenue. The platform charges a referral fee ranging from 6 to 45 percent depending on category, with a 15 percent median. Once fulfillment, advertising, and returns are added in, the total cost of selling on a marketplace typically runs 30 to 40 percent of revenue.
Etsy and eBay, strong in specific categories
Etsy remains one of the most recognizable marketplaces in the world. It is known for handmade items, jewelry, vintage goods, and craft supplies. The platform counted 86.6 million active buyers in the first quarter of 2026, its first quarter of sequential buyer growth in two years. Its take rate reached 25.7 percent in that same period.
eBay reported first quarter 2026 gross merchandise volume of 22.2 billion dollars, an 18 percent increase, alongside 136 million active buyers. The company also agreed to acquire Depop, the fashion resale platform popular with younger shoppers, for 1.2 billion dollars. That deal reflects how much fashion specifically is reshaping competition among marketplaces right now.
Marketplaces in the fashion sector
Fashion and apparel generate 850 billion dollars in global ecommerce revenue, more than any other category tracked. In the US specifically, apparel, footwear, and accessories ecommerce will grow 6.5 percent this year. Total sales will approach 250 billion dollars, a rebound after a slower 2025.
Consumer habits keep shifting, technology keeps advancing, and customer experience has become the priority across digital channels. Fashion remains one of the strongest categories inside every major marketplace because of that shift, and nowhere is that clearer than during peak season, when apparel consistently ranks among the top purchase intent categories heading into Black Friday. A shopper buying fashion online wants more than the product itself. They want to feel confident in the purchase and satisfied with the entire experience.
To deliver that, a marketplace seller needs easy navigation, accessible content, and clear organization by segment. Kids, adult, summer, winter, and so on, all need their own clear place. Payment variety and fast shipping matter just as much to closing the sale, especially during a peak window when delivery promises get tested hardest. The shopper wants to feel secure about the purchase, and wants the order as quickly as possible.
Fashion businesses of every size can find a place inside these virtual malls. To actually reach a shopper outside the US, though, a brand needs a practical way to handle international shipping, and that need only grows sharper as peak season volume climbs.
After you are on the marketplace, how do you sell internationally
Many sellers invest in a strong marketplace presence at home. Even so, they never figure out how to extend that same catalog to a shopper abroad, and Black Friday is exactly the window where that gap turns into lost revenue fastest.
ShipSmart connects that expansion into one operational flow. It combines duty and tax calculation, localized checkout, shipping, and customs documentation. That holds whether the order comes from your own storefront, Amazon, a regional marketplace like Mercado Libre in Latin America, or Amazon.es and Zalando in Spain. Instead of treating every marketplace as a separate project, your brand exports with the same standard of accuracy everywhere it sells.
It is worth talking to the team before peak season hits, if your fashion brand already performs well on US marketplaces and you want to bring that same catalog to shoppers abroad. Book a Black Friday readiness call and see how to connect your existing sales channels to one international shipping operation.
