Amazon.com is one of the largest e-commerce providers, with sprawling operations in North America, now spreading across the globe.
Its online retail business revolves around the Prime program well-supported by the company’s massive distribution network. Further, the Whole Foods Market acquisition helped Amazon establish footprint in physical grocery supermarket space.
Amazon also enjoys dominant position in the cloud-computing market, particularly in the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) space, thanks to Amazon Web Services (AWS), which is one of its high-margin generating businesses.
Amazon has also become a household name with its Alexa powered Echo devices. Artificial Intelligence (AI) backed Alexa is helping the company sell products and services.
Revenues were $574.8 billion in 2023. The company reports revenue under three broad heads—North America, International and AWS, which generated 61.4%, 22.8% and 15.8% of total revenues, respectively.
Headquartered in Seattle, WA, Amazon targets three categories of customers—consumers, sellers and website developers. Consumers are offered variety, convenience and free delivery of goods displayed on the company’s websites.
The agreements with sellers are varied, enabling them to use the company’s websites to either sell their merchandise directly, or redirect customers to the sellers’ own branded websites. In case of the latter arrangement, Amazon earns a fee for the sales thus generated.
Competition comes in the form of traditional retailers, other online retailers, media companies, web portals, search engines, e-commerce companies and cloud computing service providers.