Top online stores worldwide 2025, by net sales

The top online stores worldwide

Amazon is the largest online store on the planet. On almost every measure of size it sits at or near the top, and by store-level e-commerce net sales it is far ahead of any single rival. Behind it come a mix of Chinese platforms and large US retailers: JD.com, Walmart, Apple and the fast-growing fashion seller Shein, followed by Coupang, Target and The Home Depot. This is the ranking most people mean when they ask which online stores are the biggest by sales, and it blends two very different business models. Some names on the list, such as Apple, JD.com and Walmart, are first-party retailers that mostly sell their own inventory. Others, such as Amazon and Shein, run huge marketplaces where independent sellers list alongside the stores own goods. That mix is one reason the numbers behind these stores can look so different from one report to the next.

There is an important catch, though, and it explains why published lists disagree so often. The word biggest can mean four very different things. Net sales count a stores own first-party sales. Gross merchandise value, or GMV, counts the total value of everything sold on a platform, including goods from third-party sellers. Total company revenue adds in services such as cloud computing and advertising. And traffic simply counts visits. Each measure produces a different leader, so this report gives the net-sales ranking first, then shows how the picture shifts under the other three lenses.

To see how much this matters, take Amazon. By store-level net sales it is worth about $153 billion, by total company net sales roughly $716.9 billion, and by platform GMV around $852 billion. All three figures describe the same company in the same year, yet they are almost six times apart from smallest to largest. Multiply that gap across every marketplace on the list and it becomes clear why a single headline number, quoted without its definition, can be misleading. This report keeps to store-level net sales for the main ranking, then labels every other measure clearly so the comparisons stay fair. For the wider market these stores compete in, see our overview of e-commerce worldwide statistics and facts.

Leading online stores by e-commerce net sales

Measured by the net sales of each individual store, Amazon leads by a wide margin, followed by JD.com and Walmart. The chart shows the leading stores by store-level e-commerce net sales.

Amazon out front: on store-level net sales Amazon leads, ahead of JD.com and Walmart, with Apple and Shein close behind.

The gap at the top is striking. Amazon alone sells more through its own store than the next two stores combined, and it is the only Western retailer that competes at the very top with Chinas largest platforms. JD.com is the biggest online store outside the United States on this measure, reflecting its direct-sales model in China, where it holds and ships much of its own inventory rather than acting purely as a marketplace. Walmart, the worlds largest retailer overall, ranks third online, showing how far its digital business has come from a standing start as it links more than eleven thousand physical stores to its website. Apple and Shein are almost level, one a premium electronics seller with very high revenue per visit, the other a low-cost fashion disruptor built on huge volumes of cheap items, a reminder of how varied the top ranks have become.

Below the top five, the ranking is filled out by a set of large single-market specialists. Coupang, often called the Amazon of South Korea, reported total net revenues of about $34.5 billion in 2025, up 14 percent on the year, with roughly 25 million active customers in a single country. Target and The Home Depot follow, two US chains whose online arms alone would rank among the worlds largest stores. ECDB also lists Amazons national sites, such as its German and British stores, as separate entries worth well over $18 billion each, which is why Amazon effectively appears more than once in the fuller ranking. These are the latest available store-level figures; the ranking order has held steady into 2025, with the precise current values maintained by ECDB behind its paywall.

Why the same store shows three different sizes

Nowhere is the measurement problem clearer than with Amazon itself. Depending on which number is quoted, Amazon can look like a $153 billion store, a $717 billion company or an $852 billion platform. All three are correct, because they measure different things.

Store-level net sales count only what Amazon sells directly to shoppers as a first-party retailer, which is around $153 billion. Total company net sales, about $716.9 billion in 2025 and up 12.4 percent on the year, add everything else Amazon does, including its cloud arm Amazon Web Services, its fast-growing advertising business and subscription services such as Prime. Platform GMV, roughly $852 billion, counts the full value of goods sold across Amazon including its millions of independent third-party sellers, who now account for the majority of items sold on the site. Each layer is larger than the last, and each is a legitimate way to size the business.

The same layered picture applies to every big marketplace. JD.com reports total company revenue of about $187 billion, far above its store-level net-sales figure, because that headline includes its logistics and services arms. Walmart mixes a giant store network with a smaller but rapidly growing online business, so its e-commerce net sales are only a fraction of its total sales. Marketplaces such as Alibaba look enormous by GMV yet report much lower revenue, because they earn fees and commissions rather than booking the full value of goods sold by others. A headline number therefore means little without knowing which measure it uses, which is why our companion report on the revenue of the e-commerce industry worldwide is careful to define its terms before quoting a figure.

A different leader by gross merchandise value

Switch from net sales to GMV and the ranking is turned on its head. On this measure the Chinese groups dominate, and Amazon slips to third. The chart shows the leading e-commerce companies worldwide by GMV in 2025.

GMV tells another story: Alibaba leads on gross merchandise value, with PDD Holdings and Amazon behind it.

By GMV, Alibaba is the largest e-commerce group in the world at about $1.26 trillion, driven by the enormous third-party volume on its Taobao and Tmall marketplaces in China. PDD Holdings, owner of the Chinese discounter Pinduoduo and the international bargain app Temu, comes second at around $873 billion, having grown at extraordinary speed from almost nothing a few years ago. Amazon is third at roughly $852 billion, followed by ByteDance, whose Douyin platform has turned short video into a major storefront, then JD.com at about $556 billion and Walmart at around $270 billion.

The lesson is simple: marketplaces that host huge numbers of independent sellers look far larger by GMV than by net sales, because most of the goods on their platforms are not theirs. Alibaba and PDD sit at the top of the GMV table yet earn a fraction of that total as revenue, since they mainly collect fees from sellers. Amazon, which sells a large share of its goods directly, converts more of its GMV into its own net sales, which is exactly why it can top the net-sales ranking yet sit only third by gross merchandise value. Reading the two tables side by side is the clearest way to understand who really sells the most.

Inside the worlds biggest online store

Amazon is not only the largest online store but also one of the most concentrated geographically. The United States provides the vast majority of its sales, as the chart shows.

An American engine: the US generated about $490 billion of Amazon sales in 2025, more than ten times Germany or the UK.

The United States alone accounted for nearly $490 billion of Amazon net sales in 2025, dwarfing its next markets, Germany at about $46 billion and the United Kingdom at around $43 billion. In other words, Amazons single largest overseas market is worth less than a tenth of its home business, and the two together do not come close to its US operation. Total company net sales rose from about $638 billion in 2024 to roughly $716.9 billion in 2025, growth of more than 12 percent, so even from a vast base Amazon is still adding the equivalent of a large retailer every year.

This concentration is both a strength and a risk. Amazon owns its home market like no rival, but it is far less dominant abroad, where local champions such as JD.com in China, MercadoLibre in Latin America and Coupang in South Korea hold strong positions and often deliver faster or cheaper on home ground. Much of the industrys future growth will come from those regions rather than from a saturated United States, which is why Amazon keeps investing heavily in logistics, advertising and cloud services to defend its lead. Traditional chains are racing to match that reach, a shift we cover in our look at the largest US retailers by worldwide sales.

Amazons grip on its home market

In the United States, the single most valuable e-commerce market, Amazon is not just the leader but the overwhelming one. The chart shows the share of US online retail held by the biggest stores.

One store, two fifths: Amazon holds about 40.5 percent of US e-commerce, with Walmart a distant second at 9.2 percent.

Amazon holds roughly 40.5 percent of all US online retail, more than four times the 9.2 percent held by Walmart, its nearest challenger. Apple is third at about 3.2 percent, with a long tail of specialists such as eBay, Target and The Home Depot each holding low single-digit shares behind them. Put another way, one store handles about two of every five dollars Americans spend online, while every other retailer fights over the rest. Walmart is the only rival gaining ground at real scale, using its stores for pickup and fast delivery to close part of the gap.

That level of dominance in the biggest single market is a large part of why Amazon leads the global net-sales ranking so comfortably: winning the United States, still the second-largest e-commerce market in the world after China, is worth more than leading almost anywhere else. It also draws regulatory scrutiny. A single store handling such a large share of online spending has power over prices, over the third-party sellers who depend on its platform, and over the advertising and logistics markets that sit around it, which is why Amazons position attracts steady attention from competition regulators in both the United States and Europe.

The busiest stores by traffic

Sales are one measure of a stores reach; visits are another. Amazon leads on traffic too, but once it is set aside the most-visited list looks very different from the sales ranking, as the chart shows.

Traffic leaders differ: outside Amazon, AliExpress draws the most visits, ahead of Walmart, eBay and Etsy.

By visits, AliExpress is the most popular online store outside the big US marketplaces, with roughly 623 million monthly visits, ahead of Walmart at about 506 million, eBay at 502 million and Etsy at 333 million. Samsung, Shein, Ozon, IKEA and Mercado Libre round out the busiest sites, a list that spans Chinese exporters, US chains, a Russian marketplace and a Latin American giant. It is a strikingly different set of names from the sales ranking, and that contrast is the point.

Stores that attract enormous traffic do not always convert it into the highest net sales, and the reverse is also true. A marketplace such as AliExpress or eBay can draw huge numbers of browsers for low-value items, many of whom leave without buying, while a store such as Apple turns far fewer visits into much more revenue per shopper thanks to high prices and strong loyalty. Traffic measures attention and reach; net sales measure money actually taken. The two rarely line up, so a store that tops a most-visited list is not necessarily the one selling the most, which is another reason to be careful about which ranking a headline is really using.

The champions of their home markets

Away from the global top five, several stores dominate their own regions so completely that Amazon has never been able to displace them. Coupang, the biggest online store in South Korea, reported total net revenues of about $34.5 billion in 2025, up 14 percent on the year, serving roughly 25 million active customers in a single country. Its Rocket Delivery network, which promises same-day or next-day arrival on millions of items, has made it the Amazon of Korea and, alongside the internet group Naver, the leader of one of the worlds most advanced online markets. Coupang has grown so quickly that it now ranks among the largest online stores in the world despite selling in only a handful of countries.

In Latin America, MercadoLibre plays the same role. Its 2025 revenue passed $21 billion, built not only on its marketplace but on a tightly linked logistics arm, Mercado Envios, and a fast-growing payments business, Mercado Pago, that together lock in shoppers and sellers across Brazil, Mexico and Argentina. These regional leaders matter because they show the ranking is not simply a contest between the United States and China. In market after market, a well-run local store with faster delivery, local payment methods and a trusted brand can hold off even Amazon, and it is often these home-grown champions, rather than the global giants, that capture the next wave of first-time online shoppers.

The rise of the Chinese platforms

The clearest trend across every measure is the growing weight of Chinese-owned stores. On GMV, Alibaba and PDD Holdings already outrank Amazon, and JD.com is the largest single online store outside the United States by net sales. Their scale reflects the size of Chinas online market, the worlds largest, and a shopping culture built around mobile apps and live-streamed selling.

Growth is fastest among the newer challengers. Temu, part of PDD Holdings, and the fashion retailer Shein have expanded internationally at remarkable speed, taking value-conscious shoppers across the US and Europe with ultra-low prices shipped direct from Chinese factories. Shein alone generates revenue in the region of $24 billion, while Temu has built one of the largest user bases in global shopping in barely three years, though it spends heavily on marketing and low prices to do so and is thought to still be loss-making on many orders. Social commerce apps such as Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, have turned entertainment into a storefront and now rival traditional platforms on sales, blurring the line between a video feed and a checkout.

For Western retailers, the competitive threat is therefore no longer just Amazon but a wave of low-cost, mobile-first Chinese stores that reach shoppers directly through apps, live streams and social feeds. Their rise is squeezing prices, forcing established stores to speed up delivery and rethink how they are found in the first place. The same forces are reshaping product discovery through recommendation engines and, increasingly, artificial intelligence, a shift explored in our report on generative AI users worldwide.

Top online stores in numbers

A few figures capture the ranking. Amazon leads by net sales, revenue and US share, while Alibaba tops the GMV table and AliExpress draws the most visits outside the US marketplaces.

Together they show a market led by Amazon but increasingly shaped by a group of powerful Chinese platforms.

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