Web-only retailers are responsible for the majority of the Top 50 web sales to North America. However, the cohort is made up of just seven retailers. Those retailers’ dominance shrank slightly last year. At the close of 2023, they were down to 51.1% of the Top 50’s North American web sales from 52.2% the previous year.

Those conclusions emerge from a first-ever Digital Commerce 360 analysis of the 50 most popular retail sites in terms of web sales to North American consumers.

For 20 years, Digital Commerce 360 has analyzed the sales of top online retailers and brands based on their home base. For example, the Digital Commerce 360 Top 1000 report digs into the worldwide online sales of the 1,000 biggest online sellers headquartered in North America. In this series, we look at it from the consumer’s perspective: Which are the 50 retailer sites and marketplaces where North America’s online shoppers buy the most?

How Amazon took over

What’s striking about the list of online-only retailers in the Top 50 is that only three of them on the list are based in North America. One of those, of course, is Amazon. That’s no accident.

Amazon aggressively bought up emerging competitors until it got so big that such acquisitions would inevitably invite antitrust scrutiny. Among its most notable acquisitions were shoe e-retailer Zappos in 2009 and baby supplies merchant Diapers.com in 2010.

Web-only retailers make up the majority of the Top 50

The two web-only competitors that are ranked in the Top 50 only became significant players in the 2010s. Chewy, the online pet supplies retailer, was founded in 2011. In the same year, CSN Stores, which operated a collection of websites selling home goods, rebranded as Wayfair. The change began its ascent into the top echelons of retail ecommerce.

Meanwhile, Amazon was steadily sucking up market share, in large part because of its Amazon Prime loyalty program launched in 2005. That program initially promised consumers free shipping for a $79 annual fee. It now includes a variety of perks, including streaming TV shows, movies and music, for $139 per year. Prime had 180 million members in the U.S. in April 2024, according to Consumer Intelligence Research Partners. The program continues to give many shoppers a strong incentive to buy on Amazon.com.

Amazon’s growth also made venture capitalists leery of investing in startup online retailers. They inevitably asked those startups’ founders what would keep Amazon from imitating their business model. That’s proved to be a hard question to answer as Amazon keeps moving into new categories, including artisan-made goods and business-to-business ecommerce.

Nevertheless, there is still room for innovative newcomers that carve out a very specific niche that might not appeal to Amazon. One example is SD Bullion. The company, which sells such precious metals as gold and silver online, grew at an annual rate of 49.1% in the five-year period through 2023, according to Digital Commerce 360. But because their focus is limited, none of these niche web-only retailers have reached a scale that would put them in the Top 50.

Meanwhile, four web-only retailers based outside of North America have cracked the Top 50.

Web-only retailers grew North American web sales by 8.5% in 2023

The one growing the fastest is Shein, the Chinese company that quickly imitates trendy apparel items and sells them at cut-rate prices. It’s been selling in North America for less than a decade but already posted more than $9 billion in sales in 2023 when its web sales grew by 18.0% over the prior year.

The success of Shein and the Chinese marketplace Temu likely contributed to the falloff in North American sales for another big Chinese web-only retailer, JD.com, whose North American sales plummeted by 37.9% in 2023.

Two German companies also make the Top 50 web-only list. One is HelloFresh, which sells meal kits that consumers order online and come with the ingredients needed to cook a meal. Online retailers of these ready-to-cook meals have lost ground in recent years, in part because supermarkets now offer similar products.

Also on the list is Otto Group, a major web-only retailer in Europe that generates most of its web sales in North America from housewares retailer Crate & Barrel, which sells through about 90 stores in the U.S. and Canada as well as online.

Editor’s note: Read even more reporting, based on Digital Commerce 360’s Top 50 data in our coverage of the top online retailers and top online marketplaces selling in North America.

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