Last week I wrote that selling on Amazon means competing with Amazon retail and asked if it was an unfair situation. Many of you told us that as soon as you get a top selling line Amazon would suddenly start selling the same or a similar product and the competition is tough. Amazon have recently released their last financial quarters results and it makes interesting reading when considering third party retailers competing with Amazon. ChannelAdvisor's analysis of Amazon's results calculates that third party sales on Amazon has now hit 61% of their total GMV. This means that almost 2 in 3 sales on Amazon are from independent retailers and only 1 in 3 products are sold by Amazon. In addition ChannelAdvisor reveal that third party Amazon sales are growing at 35-45%, way faster than Amazon retail and twice as fast as the growth rate of ecommerce. Amazon retail sales are growing around 20% roughly equal to overall ecommerce growth. It's worth thinking about Amazon's business model.