Half of E-Commerce Is Now Controlled by Two Companies

Amazon and Shopify now account for roughly half of all U.S. e-commerce. Sit with that for a second. Two companies, two very different models, controlling the rails for around $600 billion of a $1.2 trillion market. Four years ago their combined share was meaningfully lower.

Most Amazon sellers read this and think the obvious story is Amazon’s dominance. That is the wrong takeaway. The more uncomfortable story is that Shopify’s rise quietly weakens the long-term position of the Amazon-only seller.

Amazon is a centralized marketplace. It aggregates demand, owns the customer relationship, controls discovery and continuously increases its take rate through ads and fees. Sellers rent access to customers. It is a phenomenal machine. It is also a landlord. The trade is simple: you get scale, Amazon gets control.

Shopify looks like the opposite. Nobody “goes to Shopify” to shop. It is infrastructure. But that is precisely why it is powerful. Shopify enables millions of brands to build their own demand engines. Email lists, SMS flows, subscription models, first-party data, brand storytelling without algorithmic throttling.

Shopify can be more potent than Amazon is. Amazon’s incentives are obvious. It will squeeze. It will push ads. It will tilt the playing field toward itself. But Amazon is predictable. Shopify, by contrast, is teaching every serious brand how to reduce dependence on Amazon. The sellers who build real DTC engines gain leverage. And leverage is the one thing Amazon sellers have historically lacked.

Meanwhile, look at the rest of the landscape. Walmart Marketplace has invested heavily in marketplace expansion. But it does not command Amazon’s traffic gravity. Walmart is incremental revenue and can diversify risk. But it does not redefine your leverage. eBay is even more specialized. It has carved out defensible territory with collectors, refurbished goods, auto parts, and enthusiast communities. But it is not a platform where most modern brands build their growth strategy. TikTok Shop represents commerce embedded in entertainment. It can drive explosive bursts of revenue for the right product in the right moment. But it is attention-dependent and algorithmically volatile. Temu and Shein built momentum through structural advantages in cross-border logistics and pricing. When regulatory conditions change, so do their economics. Target has flirted with marketplace dynamics, but without the network effects or infrastructure depth to become a true third pillar. The “other half” of e-commerce is fragmented and scrappy. The center of gravity is Amazon plus Shopify.

If you are building only on Amazon, you are building an asset that Amazon partially controls. If you are building only on Shopify, you are building an asset dependent on paid traffic platforms. If you build both, you begin to regain bargaining power.

The era of the Amazon-only brand is ending, not because Amazon is weakening, but because the ecosystem has matured. The brands that matter will not choose sides. They will treat Amazon as a distribution engine and Shopify as a relationship engine, and they will design their operations so that neither platform can unilaterally dictate their fate.

Half of U.S. e-commerce now flows through two pipes. The controversial truth is this: if you are not intentionally building on both, you are not a brand. You are a tenant.

At Lumian, we operate Amazon end to end with a dedicated brand manager supported by AI agents that handle execution across ads, catalog, inventory, and compliance. You focus on building a brand while we handle everything else.

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