Amazon.com, Inc is a Fortune 500 company which displays merchandise digitally from its own inventory and other merchants, acting an online marketplace for retail purchases.
Started as an online bookstore in 1995 in Washington State, Amazon has grown to become the world’s largest online retailer selling retail goods, consumer electronics, and proprietary Amazon products and services.
5 Amazon Questions That Will Make You Rethink Selling on Amazon
Here are 5 Amazon graphics that will make you think twice about selling on Amazon, or optimizing your Amazon operations.
1. Where does Amazon sell?
Amazon has region specific site in the United States, United Kingdom, France, Canada, Germany, Italy, Spain, Australia, Brazil, Japan, China, India, and Mexico.
To get an idea of where you can buy on Amazon, check out this map of Amazon’s world dominance:
2. What does Amazon sell?
Amazon refers to its own department selection as “Earth’s Biggest Selection”, and rightly so as they sell products in:
- Books & Audible
- Movies, Music & Games
- Home & Garden
- Sports & Outdoors
- Clothing, Shoes & Jewelry
- Kindle Tablets , E-Readers & E-Books
- Beauty, Health & Grocery
- Automotive & Industrial
With the introduction of Amazon Fresh in 2007, and Amazon’s smartphone release this year, online shoppers can find virtually anything on Amazon.
To get a scope of how many items Amazon sells, consider what Amazon doesn’t sell- which include Alcohol, Art and Gambling items, among others.
3. What Does Amazon Do?
In additional to digital commerce, Amazon.com has ventures on and offline including:
- Amazon Instant Video– Video on demand service which provides online streaming for TV and movies free for Amazon Prime members and available for rental or purchase for others.
- Amazon Prime– 2 Day delivery service contingent on annual $99/year membership.
- Amazon Web Services– Amazon’s cloud computing platform
- Amazon Local- Daily deal service similar to Groupon.
- AmazonFresh + Prime Pantry – Grocery delivery service for door delivery of non-perishables. Available in select US states for a monthly fee.
- Amazon Prime Air– (In Beta) Delivery service which utilizes flying drones to deliver packages under 5 pounds.
Amazon also owns many subsidiaries which might surprise you including:
- Alexa– Web Analytics
- Audible– Audiobooks
- IMDb– Internet Movie Database
- CreateSpace– Self publishing site for authors
- Zappos.com– Retail website, with shoe focus
- Shopbop– Designer Ecommerce site
- Quidsi- Owner of major childrens sites including Diapers.com and Look.com
- Woot– Deal site for shirts, wine and electronics
4. Where does Amazon ship from?
Amazon strategically places fulfillment centers to optimize shipping time for orders across the US and other parts of the world. In the United States alone, Amazon has over 12 fulfillment centers in:
- Washington
- Arizona
- Texas
- Pennsylvania
- California
- New Hampshire
- Delaware
- Kansas
- South Carolina
- Nevada
- Virginia
- Indiana
To get an idea of where Amazon ships from within the U.S, check out this map of Amazon’s fulfillment centers:
5. How Much Does Amazon Sell?
Last year (2013), Amazon sold $51 Billion worth of its inventory. This doesn’t include items sold from third party sellers on the Marketplace- only items sold by Amazon.
To put that revenue in perspective, that’s as much as the 2014 Sochi Olympics. Here are some things which Amazon could buy that cost $51 billion dollars:
- 218,407 Ferrari 458 Italia’s
- 177 Boeing 787’s
Want to learn more crazy things about selling on Amazon?
For more information on how to get started selling on Amazon, check out these Amazon tutorials: