US Sellers Hold 40% of Amazon’s Top 10,000, But 65% of the Revenue
A new analysis of Amazon's seller rankings shows a widening gap between how many top sellers are based in the US versus China, and how much of the actual money each group generates. ECDMA's breakdown of the data found that while Chinese sellers have taken the majority of positions in Amazon's top 10,000 US sellers by count, American sellers still generate nearly two-thirds of the GMV that group produces, and the imbalance gets far more extreme at the very top.
The Numbers Behind the Shift
Chinese sellers gained 1,342 positions within Amazon's top 10,000 sellers since July 2020, while US sellers gave up 1,320, moving their respective shares from 42.5% to 55.9% for Chinese sellers and from 53.7% to 40.5% for US sellers. That's a genuine, sustained shift in who's filling the top ranks.
Revenue tells a different story. US sellers generate 65.3% of GMV among that same top 10,000 group, compared to 28.6% for Chinese sellers. At the top 100 level, the gap widens dramatically: American sellers hold 81.4% of the positions and capture 93.2% of the GMV produced by that group.
The Price Gap Explains Most of It
The average selling price at the top 100 level tells you why. US sellers in that top tier average $47.62 per item. Chinese sellers average $22.03, less than half. As ECDMA's analysis put it, that's not a rounding difference, it's a structural one: American sellers at the top are competing on brand equity and pricing power, while Chinese sellers at similar rank are competing on volume and thin margins.
That pattern holds consistently as you move down the rankings too. US sellers make up just 34% of the 5,001 to 10,000 tier, but jump to 81% of the top 100. The higher you climb the rank ladder, the more the balance tips toward brand-driven, premium-priced positioning rather than volume alone.
Why the Old Advantages Aren't Protecting Sellers the Way They Used To
For years, the durable edge for US-based sellers came from things that were hard to replicate from a distance: listing quality, accumulated review history, account age, native-English copywriting, and general brand presence. That protection has eroded. Manufacturing proximity, direct factory relationships, export support infrastructure, and increasingly sophisticated AI tooling have closed much of the operational gap that used to separate a factory-direct Chinese seller from an established US brand.
The tenure data backs this up. Sellers who joined Amazon before 2019 now make up half of the top 10,000, down from more than 60% a year earlier. Newer sellers, many of them Chinese factory-direct operations, are filling positions that longer-tenured operators are losing, and the pace of that turnover has been accelerating rather than settling.
What This Means for Your Positioning
If you're a US brand competing in the 5,000 to 10,000 range, the data suggests the fight there increasingly comes down to whether you can hold pricing power against factory-direct competitors who have structural cost advantages you can't match on price alone. Competing on price against sellers with direct manufacturing relationships is a losing game for most brands, since your landed cost structure simply isn't built the same way.
The more durable path, based on where US sellers actually hold their ground, is building toward the top 100 profile rather than trying to out-compete on volume in the mid-tier. That means investing in the things that support a higher price point: brand recognition, customer trust built over repeat purchases, and product differentiation that gives a shopper a real reason to pay $47 instead of $22 for something in the same category. Sellers who try to win purely on cost against factory-direct competition are fighting the trend the data shows is already working against them.
