Sales from third-party merchants on Amazon doubled last year

One of the things that makes Amazon so successful is the fact that it doesn’t just sell products directly, often times the company opens up its online marketplace to third-party sellers while Amazon acts as more of an overseers. This strategy has been so successful, in fact, that sales from third-party merchants doubled in 2014 to a whopping 2 billion.

The growth of third-party sellers on Amazon was staggering last year, with two billion items sold worldwide, representing double the amount of volume seen in 2013. Amazon said its marketplace set a new record, selling more than 2 billion items worldwide last year. In a similar press release issued last year, the company said sellers sold half as many units, or 1 billion worldwide. While the number of units being sold has skyrocketed, the number of new sellers coming on board has remained flat. For both years, Amazon said the number of marketplace sellers, who use Amazon’s fulfillment service (FBA), grew by 65 percent worldwide. That business accounts for a large percentage of Amazon’s overall sales. At the end of 2014, there was 2 million sellers, who sold 40 percent of all units on Amazon.