Median Shopping impr. share

Competitive Landscape: Shopping Impression Share (2024-2026)

Legacy Dominance vs. Challenger Momentum

• Amazon’s Structural Dominance: Amazon dictates the auction ceiling, maintaining a 30-40% baseline impression share. Its deliberate summer 2025 blackout—a massive controlled experiment—temporarily ceded ground, but its rapid recovery and Q4 peak (Nov/Dec 2025) reaffirm its seasonal dominance and superior auction quality scores.
• Temu’s Aggressive Acquisition: Temu firmly holds the #2 position (~20-25% share). Crucially, during Amazon’s summer experiment, Temu’s share spiked to ~27%. This crossover proves Temu possesses the aggressive, venture-backed ad budgets required to instantly absorb available auction volume, actively “buying” market share at the expense of short-term ROAS.
• Stagnation of Legacy Alternatives: eBay exhibits a remarkably flat trajectory (~18%), indicating a mature, profitability-focused bidding strategy rather than aggressive growth. AliExpress mirrors this stagnation at a lower tier (~15-17%), failing to capitalize on market fluctuations.

External Market Drivers & Auction Divergence

• Capitalizing on Price Sensitivity: The sustained gap between Temu and legacy players like eBay highlights a macro-shift. Temu’s cross-border, low-cost model is heavily subsidized by aggressive top-of-page bidding, capturing highly price-sensitive consumers in a volatile macroeconomic climate.
• Auction Elasticity: The Shopping auction is highly elastic. When the market leader (Amazon) throttles spend, challengers immediately fill the vacuum. However, Temu’s inability to permanently retain its summer 2025 gains post-experiment suggests Amazon’s historical conversion rates ultimately win the algorithm when budgets normalize.
• Emerging Threats: The sudden, steep entry of Joybuy (~15% share in March 2026) signals continued auction volatility. As new low-cost, cross-border entrants deploy aggressive introductory ad spend, the lower-tier auction dynamics previously stabilized by eBay and AliExpress will face severe disruption.