>>In two decades of e-commerce in the US, we have produced only two standalone e-commerce companies of meaningful enterprise value: Amazon and eBay. One went public in 1997, the other in 1998. We haven’t had an IPO of an e-commerce company that has gotten to a two billion of market cap in fifteen years, let alone double digit billions.
That's the bad news. The good news: if you wanted to become a millionaire on the web with reasonable but not outsized risk, ecommerce has pretty much been your best bet for the last 15 years or so. Getting an ecommerce businesses to the $1m-$50m revenue range has been done by many folks during that time. They may not be IPOing, but I think they're happy.
Not to mention - there are literally ten thousand businesses making over $1,000,000 a year selling their products on Amazon alone. (Over 50% of total Amazon sales are 3rd party sellers, I've worked for 5 of them doing over $1,000,000))
Very true. At $DAY_JOB, I maintain the MWS integration and we do high 7 figures a year.
The problem is if your niche is profitable enough Amazon has a habit of moving in and knocking you off their site. So we only sell stuff we control the manufacturing for via Amazon because they've gone after our suppliers for anything else and then undercut us by $0.01.
Agreed - there are thousands (tens of thousands?) of E-Commerce sites that have revenues in excess of $1m. It is staggering when you scratch the surface.
That's the bad news. The good news: if you wanted to become a millionaire on the web with reasonable but not outsized risk, ecommerce has pretty much been your best bet for the last 15 years or so. Getting an ecommerce businesses to the $1m-$50m revenue range has been done by many folks during that time. They may not be IPOing, but I think they're happy.