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Comment by jldugger | Hacker News Reader

jet.com reached their 1B revenue target by losing money on every transaction: rather than have inventory, they relist competitor's inventory at lower prices. Which is why your jet.com purchase may bear the name of some Other online retailer when it arrives. Presumably Wal-Mart will correct both the inventory and the prices in the near future. And when the subsidies dissapear, so will the competition.

Besides which, isn't Amazon a cloud tech company with a vestigial retailing arm?

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> Besides which, isn't Amazon a cloud tech company with a vestigial retailing arm?

That's sort of like trying to pin down General Electric. At some point, you have to give up with the "they are a $foo company" thinking and accept that they've grown past the boundaries and limitations imposed by a single market.

What are the stats on revenue from retail vs revenue from AWS? I doubt they'd release those numbers but surely there must be an estimate

There's a third arm that is actually bigger than retail in revenue: Merchant Services (Marketplace)

AWS revenue last quarter was $3.56B (publicly stated). Total revenue, $43.7B.

AWS provides much better margins than some of their other businesses though, to the point where AWS profit can actually be more than the overall company profit (it allows them to run other divisions at a loss strategically). That doesn't seem to be that case in the most recent filing[1], but it did beat out the North American division.

1: http://www.zdnet.com/article/amazon-posts-mixed-q4-results-a...

>> jet.com reached their 1B revenue target by losing money on every transaction

First, they ship 30% of their orders from their own warehouse.

Second, if jet.com was a "bubble" company, with nothing to back themselves up, i'm not sure Walmart would have ackuired them for $3B.

Walmart's revenues are $500b a year. It's pocket change to them. And the list of old economy stalwarts overspending on tech startups is practically infinite. Few of these acquisitions ever lead to anything. Amazon must have been cracking up that they scared Walmart into doing this.

> rather than have inventory, they relist competitor's inventory at lower prices

Wow. No wonder Wal-Mart bought them, they're cut from the same cloth.

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