Amazon on Track to Control 50 Percent of U.S. E-Commerce Market

Amazon, the online retailing giant founded by Jeff Bezos, is fast approaching capturing 50 percent of the U.S. e-commerce market, according to data research firm eMarketer.

The company is forecast to hit sales of $258.2 billion by the end of 2018, a roughly 30 percent increase from the previous year. Amazon captured approximately 44 percent of the e-commerce market in 2017. The online retailing giant’s market share dwarfs eBay’s, which currently has around 6.6 percent of all U.S. e-commerce sales. The third is Apple with 3.9 percent and Walmart in fourth places, capturing 3.7 percent of the market.

“Also striking is the fact that Amazon’s marketplace is exploding — the marketplace refers to transactions that take place via third-party sellers, instead of a shopper buying one of Amazon’s in-house brands. Sales generated from the marketplace will be more than double Amazon’s direct sales in the U.S. by the end of the year,” reports CNBC.

Analysts expect Prime Day 2018, scheduled to begin Monday afternoon, will have a major impact on the company’s Q3 sales.

Amazon’s monopolistic dominance across multiple industries and its use of U.S. tax loopholes have drawn ire across the political spectrum, including from President Donald Trump. “I have stated my concerns with Amazon long before the Election,” he tweeted in March. “Unlike others, they pay little or no taxes to state and local governments, use our Postal System as their Delivery Boy (causing tremendous loss to the U.S.), and are putting many thousands of retailers out of business!”

In August of 2017, President Trump accused Amazon of killing jobs across America. “Amazon is doing great damage to tax-paying retailers,” he wrote in August 2017. “Towns, cities, and states throughout the U.S. are being hurt – many jobs being lost!”

Amazon has also come under fire for its seemingly insatiable appetite for foreign workers — whose immigration statuses can be leveraged for lower wages — over Americans. As Breitbart News’ John Binder reported, Amazon is hiring more foreign workers into the U.S. to for lucrative technology jobs than Google and Facebook combined. Statista, an online statistics firm, reported Amazon sought 2,515 foreign H-1B workers in 2017, compared with 1,213 foreign workers by Google and 720 foreign workers from Facebook in the same year.