Live Commerce
Marketplace revenue hides a widening gap between sellers
A new seller survey splits e-commerce merchants into four cohorts, showing platform growth masks who is actually winning and who is quietly stalling.
Why it matters
Platform-level totals from Amazon, Walmart or Shopify tell sellers almost nothing about their own odds. This survey of 181 merchants suggests performance is splitting into distinct groups, meaning the "rising tide" narrative no longer holds. If you sell online, your peer group — not the marketplace average — predicts your next year.
What changes next
Watch whether the survey's four cohorts map to fee tiers, ad spend, or category — that reveals which lever actually moves a seller between groups. Expect brands to benchmark against their cohort rather than headline GMV. The trend confirms if follow-up data shows the top and bottom cohorts diverging further through 2026 rather than converging.
If you sell on a marketplace, the number that matters least is the one everyone quotes. Platform-wide gross merchandise value keeps climbing, but that average tells you nothing about whether your own store is gaining ground or slowly sinking underneath it. A new survey tries to look past the top-line and ask what individual sellers are actually experiencing.
Why averages lie
The Marketplace Pulse survey covers 181 sellers with more than $2 billion in combined yearly revenue, and its central finding is that these merchants do not move as one bloc. Instead they fall into four separate cohorts, each with a different trajectory. That framing matters because platform reporting blends thriving mega-sellers with struggling small shops into a single reassuring line on a chart.
When you disaggregate, the reassurance evaporates. A marketplace can post record volume while a large share of its sellers shrink, because a handful of dominant accounts absorb most of the growth. For an individual merchant, the honest question is not "is the platform growing" but "which cohort am I in, and is it moving up or down."
What the four cohorts imply
Sorting sellers into distinct groups is more useful than a single benchmark because it points at cause. Cohorts usually separate along a few familiar fault lines: how much a seller spends on ads to stay visible, whether they own a differentiated brand or resell commodity goods, and how exposed they are to the platform's own private-label competition. Sellers in the healthy cohorts tend to control something the marketplace can't easily replicate.
The practical takeaway is to stop comparing yourself to platform GMV and start comparing to peers who run the same model. If commodity resellers are contracting while brand owners hold margin, that is a strategic signal, not a statistical footnote. It tells a seller where to invest before the trend hardens.
The honest limits
Read this survey for what it is: a snapshot of 181 self-selected respondents, weighted toward larger operators given the revenue figure. That is a meaningful sample, but it is not the long tail of tiny sellers who make up most marketplace accounts and rarely answer surveys. The cohort structure is a lens, not a census, and the summary alone doesn't tell you how each group is defined or how big it is.
Treat the four-cohort model as a way to ask better questions rather than a verdict on your business. The real value comes when you can identify which behaviours push a seller from a declining cohort into a growing one — pricing discipline, brand ownership, diversifying off a single platform. Until the underlying breakdown is public, use the finding as a prompt to audit your own dependence on any one channel, because the sellers who fared worst are almost always the ones with nowhere else to sell.
Source: Marketplace Pulse