In the fourth year of Target's opening to third-party merchants, the number of sellers has only increased to 650

It is learned that since the opening of third-party sellers in 2019, Target's third-party market has entered its fourth year. According to the latest data from Marketplace Pulse, the number of Target's third-party sellers has only increased to 650 in four years. Despite this, the platform is still limited to invited sellers.

On February 25, 2019, Target launched a marketplace called Target+, or TargetPlus. It started with 30 sellers, but in its fourth year, the platform has only grown to 650 invited sellers. In the past 12 months, the platform has added 190 new sellers.

Compared to the thousands of new sellers joining Amazon every day and Walmart every month, Target’s number of new sellers is small. But it’s not because sellers are reluctant to join, but so far, Target+ is still invitation-only.

Last year, Walmart opened its marketplace to international sellers, which quickly expanded its seller base. By the end of the year, 35% of active sellers on Walmart's marketplace had joined in 2022. This means that if Target opens its marketplace more, it will have more sellers.

But Target has stuck to its value proposition of curating sellers and merchandise, so its third-party marketplace is unlikely to grow to the scale of Walmart and Amazon.

Despite having fewer sellers, Target is one of the most visited e-commerce platforms in the U.S., with online traffic roughly half that of Walmart and nearly 200 million monthly visitors. However, compared to Walmart’s nearly 80,000 active sellers, Target has several orders of magnitude fewer sellers, so the average seller traffic is much higher.

Editor✎ Ashley/

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