The retail king

With the market having crashed recently, it’s a great time to go looking for bargains if you have some money to invest. Here’s a candidate to consider: Amazon.com (Nasdaq: AMZN). The stock actually recently hit an alltime high, but it often trades at a premium price — and then goes on to hit new highs.

Amazon is more than a huge retailer with more than 110 million Prime members worldwide. Its real longterm growth driver is its cloud-computing business, Amazon Web Services (AWS), which is growing considerably faster than the company’s retail operations — with far fatter profit margins, too.

Amazon was in excellent shape when the coronavirus panic started in February — and it’s doing well in the COVID-19 era, too: Millions of Americans who are facing government-ordered lockdowns are relying on online orders and home-delivery systems to an unprecedented degree. Amazon responded by hiring another 100,000 workers, and recently announced that it’s hiring 75,000 more. It’s giving top priority to essential items such as medical supplies, groceries and household staples.

The pandemic experience will get many new customers used to online shopping; an entire generation is being trained to get what they need from e-commerce vendors like Amazon.

Consider buying some shares of Amazon.com, or at least putting it on your watch list. (The Motley Fool owns shares of and has recommended Amazon.com.)