Top 10 eCommerce Companies in the World 2024
In this article we have written about the top 10 ecommerce companies in the world 2024. The global ecommerce market size is approximated at more than $6 trillion in 2024 and which has been expected to grow at more than 15% annually till 2027. These shopping websites are now competing with biggest offline brick and mortar stores across the world. The various segments where ecommerce is cementing its position are online shopping, travel & tourism bookings, education etc.
Top eCommerce Companies Ranking 2024 by Revenue:
The top ecommerce companies 2024 include names like Amazon, JD, Walmart, Alibaba followed by Booking.com, Rakuten, Otto etc. Here is a list of the top 10 eCommerce companies in the world 2024.
Quick Glance:
1. Amazon
Amazon is an US based ecommerce giant. It was founded by Jeff Bezos on July 5, 1994.
Image: flickr.com/photos/mikemacmarketing/
It is one of the top ecommerce companies in the world 2024 if measured in terms of Market capitalization and revenue. Jeff Bezos firstly started it as online bookstore and later they diversified to sell whole range of products, which has now become the world’s largest online shopping platform.
This can be found in company’s logo as well which has curved arrow shaped like smile representing from A to Z which suggests that company has every product from A to Z. Jeff Bezos initially named it as Cadabra, Inc but later it was named as Amazon which was the biggest river in the world and also Amazon was a place that was exotic and different. Amazon initially for almost 5 years did not make any profit due to its unusual business model. But Amazon survived and made first profit in the year 2001 that proved Bezos' unconventional business model could succeed. Amazon has nearly 300,000 employees and every employee works with a mindset that how they can create value for the customers. Due to such vision, Amazon was able to achieve $100 billion mark in annual revenues in the year 2015. Amazon has its presence in many countries and now investing huge amount of money to expand its operations in India as well. It announced to acquire Whole foods, a supermarket chain of 400 stores to strengthen its physical presence and to challenge Walmart’s supremacy in brick and mortar stores.
Revenues ($ Bn): 575
2. JD.com
JD.COM is a Chinese B2C ecommerce company. Company is headquartered in Beijing, China.
Image: Wikimedia
Formerly it was known with a name 360buy and currently this platform has more than 260 million active users, who are engaged with offers, new products and much more. Company was founded by Liu Quiangdong in 1998, that’s why it is also known with a name Jingdong. The company firstly started its business as optical magneto store but soon they diversified, selling mobile phones, electronics etc. the company is making use of AI and high tech technology to improve its delivery system. JD.COM now offers wide variety of products, almost across every major category like FMCG, food, home appliances, apparel etc making it one of the top ecommerce companies globally. They possess largest drone delivery system, robots and autonomous technology, delivery through drones. They are currently testing autonomous robots for making deliveries and also they are investing huge amount in building drone delivery airports, driverless deliveries using autonomous trucks etc. This company was able to achieve record by selling products of worth $19 billion in a single day. The company is also famous for its Jingteng’s plan, this strategy provides brand owners information about the accurate target consumer groups and helps merchants to achieve effective and accurate marketing which helps them in increasing their sales further. Walmart sold its ecommerce business to JD.COM to get 5% equity stake in JD.COM. JD.COM is planning to increase its presence across Europe, UK and France in coming years.
Revenues ($ Bn): 152
3. Alibaba
Alibaba is one of the China’s biggest ecommerce firms and was founded by 18 people led by Jack Ma, a former English teacher from Hangzhou in 1999.
Image: flickr.com/photos/leighklotz/
Jack Ma believed that it will empower small businesses and will level the playing field by leveraging innovation and technology to compete in the global economies. They enable the businesses to transform their way of doing business by providing them fundamental technological infrastructure so that they can leverage the power of internet to engage with the users and customers. As the name suggests it opens for small- to medium-sized companies. Alibaba is the most valuable online retailer in the world and has its operations expanded in more than 200 countries. It became the 2nd Asian company to break the $500 billion valuation mark making it a top ecommerce company in 2024. In the early phase Soft bank, Goldman Sachs invested heavily in Alibaba. The company accounted for 80% of the total online sales happening in their nation through their online portal and feature around billion of products due to which it was featured in the world’s top 20 most visited sites. Alibaba is planning to spend 500 billion yuan over five years to build robust logistic network in China and around the world.
Revenues ($ Bn): 130
4. Walmart
Walmart Inc. is an US retail giant and was founded by Sam Walton in the year 1962.
Image: flickr.com/photos/jeepersmedia/
Walmart has more than 11000 stores and is operating across 20 countries under 50 different names. Walmart was able to generate $480 billion of revenue and was able establish it as world’s largest company by revenue according to Fortune Global 500 list. The revenue generated through its ecommerce operations is just 4% of its overall revenue. Walmart is famous among its customers because Walmart customers able to purchase products at very low price on any day. The reason behind selling items at lower price is that Walmart is able to achieve economies of scales. Walmart analyse large amount of user data which allows them to optimise their operations by predicting consumer’s habits. Now Walmart is focussing more on expanding online commerce. In year 2016, it acquired Jet.com to compete with Amazon.com. Walmart’s US ecommerce CEO considering doubling their warehouses for ecommerce to enhance consumers digital experience. In early 2006 when India had strict FDI regulations, Walmart announced a joint venture with Bharti Enterprise. Bharti enterprise would handle the front end retail stores and Walmart takes care of cold chain and logistics. Now Walmart is in talks to buy India’s ecommerce giant Flipkart at a valuation close to $20 billion. If the deal goes through, it will pose a great threat and competition to Amazon’s India ecommerce operations.
Revenues ($ Bn): 82
5. Naspers
Naspers is an company founded in 1915 which has evolved to become a leading ecommerce player.
Image: company website
The company, based out of South Africa, was once a leading publishing house leading production of newspapers, books etc. The company then ventured its investments in Chinese company Tencent and has become a top ecommerce player world over. Gradually the company has forayed into several online retail businesses. Some of its prominent subsidiaries include Prosus, Media24 and Takealot. Some prominent online businesses owned by the company are PayU, Udemy, OLX, Swiggy, Stack Overflow etc.
Revenue ($ Bn): 32
6. Bookings
Booking holdings was earlier named as Priceline.com and it has its headquarter in US.
Image: Wikimedia
It was founded by JS Walker in the year 1997, and Priceline went public in the year 1999 and was able to generate $13 Billion through IPO. Price started its business by selling gasoline, groceries, telephone services, second hand goods, home mortgages, online travel site and new cars under its name your own price service. Priceline discontinue some services to focus more on travel business in the year 2000. Priceline was able to generate its first profit in the year 2001. Priceline also enters into retail hotel business in the year 2004 by acquiring a majority stake in TravelWeb. It also acquires Activehotel.com, an online hotel booking company in Europe. To grow further they acquired booking.com in the year 2005 which is now world’s largest accommodation website today. Priceline further acquired companies in online hotel space and surpassed Expedia to become India’s largest online hotel reservation service. Priceline group was also named as Fortune most admired company as well as most innovative company in the travel space. It operates its website in more than 40 languages and 200 countries. It was able to sell more than 7 million air tickets through its platform, consumer booked 500 million room nights of accommodation and 60 million rental car days. One of its subsidiary rentalcars.com was awarded world’s leading car rental app.
Revenues ($ Bn): 21
7. Rakuten
Rakuten is a Japanese ecommerce company based in Tokyo and was founded by Hiroshi Mikitani 1977.
Image: flickr.com/photos/priceminister/
Rakuten is a Japanese word which means Optimism, is also called as Amazon of Japan, offering thousands of products online. It offers digital content, fin-tech solutions and ecommerce services to over 1 billion members around the world. It has total strength close to around 15,000 employees worldwide. It expands its operations through joint venture and acquisition. It acquired Buy.com, play.com, viber etc. to mark its presence in different countries. It also invested in companies like Pinterest, AHA life, Lyft, Acrons etc. and also it has its own online marketing business, Rakuten Marketing. The company went public in year 2000, at that time it had 2300 stores and 95 million page views per month making it as the most famous site in Japan. Rakuten was one of the first major companies which started accepting bitcoins for payments across its global marketplaces. Rakuten to market its platform signed one of the biggest deal with FC Barcelona, one of the most famous football team in Europe with its name appearing on players jerseys. In 2018, group purchased Marine and Asahi fire from one of the Japans leading bank Nomura for an estimated 46 billion yen. This will Rakuten’s first investment in general insurance sector and the Asahi will become company’s wholly owned subsidiary which will provide accident, fire and automotive insurance to corporate clients and various other consumers.
Revenues ($ Bn): 14
8. eBay
eBay was founded by Pierre Omidyar in the year 1995, it is a ecommerce company based out in San Jose, California.
Image: flickr.com/photos/jeepersmedia/
It provides people the option to buy or sell wide variety of products or services worldwide and it follows both B2C and C2C kind of business model. The company listed almost every saleable item by year 2000 and the business grew quickly. Company connect millions of buyers and sellers around the world, making it one of the largest ecommerce companies in 2024. They used robust technology to power their platform which enables sellers to offer their inventory and list their items on their platform and let customers to find and purchase it, virtually anytime and anywhere. It has its operations in more than 30 countries. eBay has approximately 14,000 employees worldwide. It has crossed downloads of 390 million across the globe. It widely uses analytics to analyse the aspects of buying and selling behaviour so that they can enhance the customer experience. eBay had some of the biggest technology firms like Paypal, Skype, Stubhub etc. eBay generates revenue by charging the listing fees from sellers and some commission from sellers on the sale of product through their platform.
Revenues ($ Bn): 10
9. ASOS
ASOS.com is a British online fashion store aimed at youngsters and adults having a popular brand recall.
Image: company website
It was founded by Nick Robertson and Quentin Griffiths in the year 2000 and is headquartered in Camden Town, at Greater London House and has its major fulfilment center located in Barnsley, South Yorkshire. Asos sells over 80000 brands and has its own range of clothing. Asos.com is a global online beauty and fashion retailer offers menswear, womenswear, jewellery, footwear and beauty products. It ships their products over 140 countries through various warehouses in UK, China, US and Europe. ASOS basically abbreviated to the term AsSeenOnTheScreen limited. ASOS has over 4500 employees and is largest independent fashion online store in UK. Recently they launched a marketing campaign intended to take full advantage of the Instagram Stories’ feature encouraged users to upload pictures or videos of ASOS products and they were able to generate almost 3 million footprints in UK itself. It has around 10 million downloads and app has a key feature that allows users to upload pictures of clothing they like and the app will return the product similar or close to the uploaded product.
Revenues ($ Bn): 4.5
10. Otto
The Otto group is one of the biggest ecommerce companies mainly based in France and Germany and has its operations in more than 20 countries.
Image: company website
It was founded by Werner Otto as a mail order company in Hamburg, and in less than 2 years of its operations, Otto was able to increase its turnover by a factor of 5. In the year 1995, Otto goes online and made available extensive range of products online. The group offers new concept of variety of products and range to cater to the changing needs of the consumer in the retail sector. The company now provides services related to logistics, transport and quality services to the companies outside the group or to its partners. In the year 2000, Otto group was able to secure 2nd position in B2C business after Amazon. OTTO group was able to position itself as the world’s largest online retailer for fashion and lifestyle products. Otto also launched augmented reality stores where users can try on items from nearby Otto store in front of their webcam and later they can post their pics on social networking site like Facebook. Otto group incorporated new idea of open commerce where with the help of technology, it compliments its own fashion range by using user generated content comprising ideas from third parties. This gives customers new access to shop assortment.
Revenues ($ Bn): 4.2
Ranking Methodology for Top Ecommerce Companies 2024
1. The leading ecommerce and online shopping brands are taken.
2. Parameters like revenues and growth are taken.
3. All brands are ranked based on their annual revenue.
Browse similar company lists across 50 sectors. The top brand lists category covers rankings of companies based on various parameters.
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