Median Shopping impr. share

Macro-Trend Analysis: Shopping Impression Share

Legacy Dominance vs. Challenger Momentum

• Amazon’s Entrenched Supremacy: Excluding its controlled experimental dark period in Summer 2025, Amazon maintains absolute auction dominance, consistently capturing 30%–45% impression share. Its trajectory features distinct seasonal peaks (Q4 2025, Summer 2026), indicating highly elastic, event-driven budget scaling (e.g., Black Friday, Prime Day).
• The Cooling of Aggressive Challengers: Temu initially commanded a strong 20%–25% share, capitalizing heavily during Amazon’s temporary absence. However, Temu’s momentum steadily decays throughout 2026, dropping below 20%. This signals a strategic shift from aggressive, venture-backed market acquisition to stricter profitability and ROAS targets.
• Stagnation of Secondary Players: Legacy player eBay exhibits a remarkably flat trajectory (~16%–18%), reflecting a rigid, highly constrained bidding strategy rather than dynamic market capture. AliExpress mirrors this baseline stability, only briefly overtaking Temu during Q4 2025.

Market Drivers & Auction Divergence

• Who is “Buying” the Market? Amazon remains the undisputed market-maker, leveraging massive capital to dictate auction density. Temu’s early trajectory indicates it was actively “buying” impression share at a premium to force cross-border market penetration, a strategy that has since normalized.
• External Forces: Auction fluctuations are heavily driven by seasonal retail events rather than permanent shifts in consumer price sensitivity. When Amazon scales spend, challengers are systematically suppressed. The data proves that while low-cost disruptors (Temu, AliExpress) successfully carved out a baseline share, they lack the sustained ad capital to permanently dethrone Amazon’s macro-dominance in the Shopping auction.