Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Robert Moore from RJMetrics took this a step further, identifying that 11 percent (110,000) of the top 1M websites on the internet by Alexa traffic ranking are eCommerce sites and calculating the distribution of these websites in total numbers as well as by share of retail sales, and came up with some very interesting results shown in the table below.

From this research, we know that the top 1% (Amazon, eBay, Walmart among them) of the top visited eCommerce sites on the Internet are capturing 34% of total sales. This is unsurprising for such big companies, with huge brands, and huge marketing dollars backing them. We call this the “fat head” (vs. long tail) of eCommerce stores and it is a very elite group. In the mid tier, eCommerce stores that break into the top 500,000 in Alexa rankings make up 51% of the total businesses and 63% of total revenue, still a very healthy showing....