On July 5 1994, Amazon was founded by Jeff Bezos and originally envisioned as an online book store. Now, it encompasses a broad range of e-commerce solutions, cloud hosting, audio and video streaming services and more. However, the vast majority of Amazon's revenues are still generated by its first- and third-party marketplaces. In the first quarter of 2024, the former contributed 38 percent and the latter 24 percent to its overall revenues of $143.3 billion.
The dominance of Amazon in the U.S. e-commerce market is also evident in a recent Statista Consumer Insights survey and is consistent across generations. Between 72 and 76 percent of respondents ranging in age from Gen Z to Baby Boomers have ordered something off of Amazon in the past twelve months, with Walmart, originally known for its vast armada of brick-and-mortar stores around the country, coming in second with 44 to 51 percent.
While Target places third out of 18 stores contained in the survey for Gen Z and Millennials, members of the Gen X and Baby Boomer brackets prefer eBay, with 20 percent in each group having ordered off of the platform in the past year. AliExpress, the global marketplace platform of the Alibaba Group and one of Amazon's biggest competitors from a worldwide perspective, only attracted the attention of one percent of Baby Boomers and six percent of respondents born between 1956 and 1979. 17 percent of survey participants between the ages of 30 and 44 had used the Chinese company's services in the 12 months before answering the Statista questionnaire, while the usage share stood at eleven percent for those younger than 30.
