Wow. How is that even possible?
Growing by a third in one year at that scale is completely mind boggling to me.
Growing by a third in one year at that scale is completely mind boggling to me.
Say I want a 2.2" ILI9341-driven TFT screen. That's not exactly something that you need everyday, so I could go to AliExpress/Taobao and get N for $3 ea in ~3 weeks, or eBay to get one for $4-5 in a lottery of anywhere from 3 days to 2 months. But now, I can get one from Amazon for $10 tomorrow.
It has prime shipping, which means you gotta figure they use the whole 'Fulfilled By Amazon' thing; I think that's like $3 a pop for small items. Heck, I was thinking of trying to make some money off of that kind of arbitrage, but it wouldn't be stable income since it's so dependent on a single 3rd-party company. Also, you'd literally be profiting off of China's sweatshop factories and lack of compunction around IP, which I feel sort of 'eh' about. At least using the things, you can argue there might be an end to justify the mildly shady means.
And it's just as likely to work as one from those other sources. If I wanted ethically-sourced reliable hardware I'd pay like $40 to get one with fast shipping from Adafruit. I really appreciate all that they do, but I also can't afford to ignore price for every purchasing decision that I make - and I am definitely not alone there, so there's probably still a lot of benefit to being "the everything store."
It used to be the case that Amazon was very rarely significantly undersold. Starting ~3 years ago, I started to find that Amazon was somewhat frequently undersold by enough that I was willing to wait for Ebay or Ali (or camelcamelcamel to email me an Amazon price drop).
I think Amazon's current positioning is more profitable for them and makes me happy as an investor in AMZN, but as a consumer, it makes me Google shop more often than before.
But I do also order larger quantities of things from China, when I can plan ahead. I go to Amazon when I can't plan ahead, and more frequently these days, to get a working reference implementation up and running before I start running around making a BOM for a prototype. It's amazing how much time and money that can save you.
It has a massive impact on buying decisions, and I probably overpay quite a lot for a lot of things.
https://ycharts.com/companies/AMZN/revenues
The Whole Foods acquisition did add a billion, so that helps.
Still a really impressive 29% without taking WF into account.
1 -https://www.census.gov/retail/mrts/www/data/pdf/ec_current.p...
Plenty of room to grow!
Apple stores also draw in people for repairs, etc. via their online presence (e.g. buy online, pick up in store). WF is 100% in-store.
It's astonishing WF is able to generate this level of revenue on so relatively few stores.
Especially in the HN crowd, its easy to forget that e-commerce is still <9% of global retail. And while that number won't go to 100%, its expected to double in the next four years.
So given that number alone, we should expect a ~20% YoY increase in revenue from Amazon. 34% is still excellent, but makes a little bit more sense when you frame it in terms of overall sector growth.