Selling on Amazon Marketplace enables individuals and businesses of all sizes to reach hundreds of millions of customers instantly when they sell their products on Amazon. Sellers on Amazon can list their products with no listing fee and have their products featured right alongside items carried by Amazon.
Marketplace's early days were not easy. First, we launched Amazon Auctions. Not many customers came. Auctions transformed into zShops, which was basically a fixed price version of Auctions. Again, no customers. But then we morphed zShops into Marketplace. Internally, Marketplace was known as SDP for Single Detail Page. The idea was to take our most valuable retail real estate—our product detail pages—and let third-party sellers compete against our own retail category managers. It was more convenient for customers, and within a year, it accounted for 5% of units. Today, more than 46% of our units are sold by third-party sellers worldwide. Customers ordered more than two billion units from sellers in 2014.
