Five Largest Online Shopping Portals in the World

Online shopping has been on the rise for some time now. The top five online shopping sites show no signs of slowing down, either.

Gone are the days of spending a Saturday going shopping at a nearby store. Instead, the quick, easy e-commerce retail world has taken hold. With just a few clicks, almost anything can be delivered right to a customer’s door. With so much success, e-commerce giants have been growing steadily, such as Craigslist and AliExpress. Below, the five largest online shopping portals in the world are examined, as well as ways in which businesses can streamline their own online purchasing processes.

#5 – Craigslist

Founded in 1995, Craigslist has branched out into many categories including jobs, housing, services, community, concert, resumes, items for sale and items or services wanted. In 2000, it expanded across the U.S. and now it covers 70 countries around the world. According to a Mashable article, Craigslist receives more than 50 billion monthly pageviews of more than 100 million classifieds and two million job ads. As noted in a Forbes article, Craigslist is the “cockroach of the internet age, an ugly but effective e-commerce platform.”

#4 – AliExpress

Owned by Alibaba and based in China, AliExpress facilitates small businesses to sell their products to customers around the world. An article in The Guardian notes that just as Amazon is the favorite online shopping site in the U.S. and Europe, Alibaba is dominant in China. According to a China Internet Watch report, AliExpress has reached 150 million overseas buyers with monthly views exceeding 200 million worldwide. The site is famous for cheap clothes, shoes, accessories, makeup and home goods.

#3 – ASOS

This online shopping site is the biggest platform in the U.K. A Statista report notes that annual revenue for ASOS reached 1.93 billion GBP in 2017 alone. ASOS’ success is not slowing down any time soon. The mega-retailer of all things fast-fashion recently announced a 27 percent jump in revenue from January to August 2018, as noted by a Business Insider article. ASOS is known for Millennial-focused fashion, selling in-house brands along with designer labels. The company launches 5,000 new items each week and has over 85,000 products in stock at all times.

#2 – eBay

Resale giant eBay is a multinational e-commerce company that has provided a platform for customer to customer (C2C) online sales services from 1995. Perhaps its most well-known feature is the auction platform and shipping website where people can sell, bid on and buy items around the world. According to a Statista report, eBay consistently ranks as one of the biggest U.S. online companies based on market capital, which exceeded 31 billion U.S. dollars as of the end of 2016. As of the second quarter of 2018, eBay’s total user count settled at 175 million active buyers.

#1 – Amazon

As the leading e-retailer in the U.S., with 195 million monthly unique visitors, Amazon sells pretty much everything a buyer could want, ranging from specific foods and beverages to electronics, books and home goods. The international e-commerce company offers computing services, digital content, online retail and more. As a Statista report notes, at the end of the first quarter of 2016, Amazon reported more than 310 million active user accounts worldwide. The following year, Amazon generated 178 billion U.S. in net sales alone. Amazon offers anything to everyone everywhere.

Streamlining the Online Purchasing Process

According to a Statista report, an estimated 1.66 billion people around the world purchased items online in 2017 alone. That translates to 2.3 trillion U.S. dollars spent on global e-retail sales. Excellent business models require streamlined purchasing processes. Despite purchasing being one the most integral parts of good business, often it gets overlooked. For businesses struggling to increase revenue in this day and age of e-commerce aplenty, taking a long look at the purchasing process to make necessary changes is a must.

Punchout catalogs are a great solution to purchasing problem woes. They enable businesses to achieve maximum supply chain efficiency savings while managing their business-to-business (B2B) markets. It also helps customers simplify the shopping experience by allowing them to access catalog content from the procurement system with a single click, without entering any login credentials. This single point of entry makes the entire shopping process easier.

Get on board with the methods used by the big online retailers and use punchout catalogs in order to drive efficiency and shopper experience simplicity.