The top 500 ecommerce retailers

Finding good ecommerce niches

[gabby]

Here's some food for thought when searching for ecommerce niches. Perhaps these are good markets to be in, or perhaps these are the markets to avoid.

[internetretailer.com ]

[arieng]

I doubt that this list is truly the top 500 ecommerce sites. There are several direct competitors of ours that made that list, and I have reason to believe that we outsell at least a couple of them.

Of course, we keep our sales numbers to ourselves whereas many of these companies use them as a PR crutch. I would rather refer to this list as the "Top 500 ecommerce sites that announce all of their proprietary information to the world".

<confession>I guess that sounds a little nasty, maybe I'm subconsciously jealous that we'll never make the list. Then again, we'll never show up on the big boys' radar either. :) </confession>

[minnapple]

Cool, one of my clients made the list.

[trinorthlighting]

Hmm, these lists look like publically traded companies that have to divulge their financials to wall street.

Imagine all the individuals who have private businesses where public accounting information is not available.

[jsinger]

Not all are publicly traded and many publicly traded Brick/Mortar retailers don't break out online sales. "Top 500" surely doesn't mean the 500 highest volume in order.

This subject came up last year. Some people said that book was mostly a ripoff for the high cost. Contains revenue **estimates** on many sites.

Looks more like a diversified list of 500 representative high revenue commerce sites.

[AffiliateDreamer]

It would be interesting to know the figures for #500 (or is it there and I just couldn't find it?).

Also a breakdown of affilaite based stores versus non-affiliate, and how much the affiliate program brings in for each.

[sniffer]

Is the world or just USA?

[Rugles]

There were Canadian companies in there so I would suggest its for North American companies.

>>>>It would be interesting to know the figures for #500 (or is it there and I just couldn't find it?).

I would love to know the sales figure for #500. That way I would have a sales target for next year ;-).

[bcolflesh]

This excludes adult entertainment ecommerce retailers, obviously.

[AffiliateDreamer]

I think the list excludes allot of things. Like others mentioned, it is basically a list of companies that are either public or make their sales known.

I'm sure we all have examples of sites we are sure are doing pretty well.

For example, I know of a site that does 40 million a year. Do you guys think it is too small for #500? (possible I guess!)

[AffiliateDreamer]

Actually what would really be awesome would be if someone analyzed how each company marketed to get to that level, or at least how much they SPENT to brand themselves.

I would be interested to know how the generic domain based stores benefited over the 'brandable' type domains in terms of saved marketing expense etc.

[corbing]

Last year the #500 spot was about $5M if I recall correctly. The year before it was about $3.5M. This year's book won't be available until the IR conference next week in San Jose.