The everything shop
What does Amazon sell? It’s more a question of what it doesn’t. Initially, when it set up in the 1990s, Amazon flogged books. They were portable, relatively cheap and came in enormous variety. It soon expanded into CDs, DVDs, electronics and toys. It now sells, among other things, clothes, jewellery, homewares and food. Amazon recently launched its own-brand clothes lines (Prime Wardrobe lets you try first and send back free) and has been revealed to be selling a huge range of products under undisclosed brands such as Mama Bear, Happy Belly and Denali. In the early 2000s came Amazon Web Services, and the company is now one of the largest providers of cloud infrastructure services, making more than US$900 million income last quarter on US$4 billion in revenue, heading for US$16 billion for the year; Netflix, which now accounts for more than a third of peak download traffic in the US, uses Amazon servers.
In 2005, it launched Amazon Prime, which delivers goods without extra charge if you pay an annual fee ( Prime Now delivers in two hours); libraries of streaming video and music were later added to the service.
The company’s original video content – shows such as Transparent, Top Gear offspring The Grand Tour and Fleabag have been produced by Amazon Studios since 2010 – is now competing with Hollywood (it also produces video games).
AmazonFresh, its grocery delivery service, arrived in 2006 and now serves some US cities, London, Berlin and Tokyo. Its purchase this year of greenish North American chain Whole Foods will accelerate its goal of delivery of groceries. In August, it debuted “instant pickup” sites at several US universities, expanding on existing same-day pickup sites.
The Kindle debuted in 2007. Writers can self-publish their books in digital form, or print-ondemand; occasionally, one – such as Andy Weir’s The Martian – becomes a global hit.
In its 23 years the company has bought companies useful to the mission, apparent in its logo, of offering products from A to Z, if not also for cross-marketing and ticket-clipping.
These include book referral site Goodreads, audio book site Audible.com, comics site ComiXology, and the UK-based Book Depository, said to have been picked up for north of £100 million. In 2015, it opened its first physical bookstore, now has a dozen, and plans hundreds more.
Amazon also sells a range of electronic devices including Fire tablets and, since 2016, Echo, its “smart speaker” personified by virtual assistant Alexa. The aim, it’s clear, is not to make money off the hardware but to keep selling digital content to its customers.
Although Amazon produces an increasing amount of what it sells, reportedly half of the goods it shifts are via third-party sellers through its Marketplace, from which the company takes a cut, and its Affiliate Program, which links ads on other sites to Amazon, is said to be the second most popular online ad network after Google Ads.