A quarter of Amazon merchants’ sales are now cross-border

Amazon Vice President Eric Broussard has revealed to Reuters that more than 25% of revenue generated by third-party sellers on Amazon was made by cross-border sales, in which the seller’s products are sold and shipped to someone in another country. That figure is up a whopping 50% from a year earlier. Recently Amazon has been urging its third-party sellers to make their items available on foreign Amazon marketplaces, and analysts estimate that the third-party sellers who did so in 2017 earned a combined $50 billion to $75 billion. The more cross-border third-party merchant sales Amazon makes benefits Amazon as well, of course. And not just in fees and a cut of the revenue either. Cross-border sales help Amazon take on eBay and China’s Alibaba, whose marketplaces rely heavily on selling to other countries.