According to an August 8, 2018 story in Bloomberg Businessweek, Amazon has about a 5 percent share of U.S. retail spending (excluding cars and car parts and visits to restaurants and bars), and a 43.5 share of American online spending in 2018. The forecast is for Amazon to own 49 percent of the total American online spending in 2018, with two-thirds of Amazon's revenue coming from the U.S.[51]
In September 2017, Amazon announced plans to locate a second headquarters in a metropolitan area with at least a million people.[45] Cities needed to submit their presentations by October 19, 2017 for the project called HQ2.[46] The $5 billion second headquarters, starting with 500,000 square feet and eventually expanding to as much as 8 million square feet, may have as many as 50,000 employees.[47] In 2017, Amazon announced it would build a new downtown Seattle building with space for Mary's Place, a local charity in 2020.[48]
Many items on Amazon come from third-party sellers on the Marketplace, indicated by a "Sold by" line near the "Add to Cart" button. If both Amazon and third-party sellers offer the item, the large "Add to Cart" button buys from Amazon, and you'll see a few alternative "Add to Cart" buttons with different prices and a link to a full list of used and new versions of the product. Marketplace sellers set their own prices, so you might find a great discount on a used item, or come across a rare, discontinued product that's only for sale at a collector's price. Even when buying from another seller, Amazon itself handles your payment, so you don't need to worry about your credit card information leaking out.
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Use Cyber Monday to do shopping you would have otherwise done. One big benefit to Cyber Monday is that stores usually offer percent-off deals that apply across multiple product categories, so you can potentially get a discount on a wider array of items, says Palmer. “In addition to double digit discounts, it’s easy to find free shipping offers,” she adds.
Some other large e-commerce sellers use Amazon to sell their products in addition to selling them through their own websites. The sales are processed through Amazon.com and end up at individual sellers for processing and order fulfillment and Amazon leases space for these retailers. Small sellers of used and new goods go to Amazon Marketplace to offer goods at a fixed price.[148] Amazon also employs the use of drop shippers or meta sellers. These are members or entities that advertise goods on Amazon who order these goods direct from other competing websites but usually from other Amazon members. These meta sellers may have millions of products listed, have large transaction numbers and are grouped alongside other less prolific members giving them credibility as just someone who has been in business for a long time. Markup is anywhere from 50% to 100% and sometimes more, these sellers maintain that items are in stock when the opposite is true. As Amazon increases their dominance in the marketplace these drop shippers have become more and more commonplace in recent years.[citation needed]
Amazon was never going to be able to compete with Google’s YouTube in user-uploaded video content, and it didn’t have the social infrastructure of Facebook to become a destination where people discuss their lives and share videos from around the web. But what Amazon did have was the resources to purchase a company that was poised to outrun both Facebook and YouTube to a new type of business: live-streaming, in particular video games live-streaming. The pioneer of that market was Twitch, which Amazon purchased in 2014 for just shy of $1 billion.
This service isn't just for packaged goods, either. Many stores offer shoppers the opportunity to order fresh produce, meats, dairy, and other groceries online and get these items delivered directly to their homes. In addition, many products that aren't necessarily found easily in stores can be found online — sometimes for a much cheaper price. You might even be able to take advantage of online rewards or cash-back offers, too.
Amazon, with its unfettered access to troves of valuable consumer and seller data, came upon a rather interesting business model around 2009, when it launched a private label division under the name AmazonBasics. It started first with the items the company noticed people most often purchased without thinking too hard about the brand name, like batteries and HDMI cables. But as The New York Times reported this past summer, this proved to be a way to fast track a fledgling product category into a massive money-making top seller — AmazonBasics’ AA batteries now outsell Duracell and Energizer on Amazon.com after just a few years.
Amazon first entered the media industry as a major online retailer in the late ‘90s. The company began by selling CDs and DVDs to a burgeoning market of online shoppers who began turning to the internet for music and movies, before the technical feasibility of streaming and the advent of the iPod. But it wasn’t until 2005, with the initial launch of Amazon Prime, that the company began laying the ground work for a future digital media ecosystem that integrated directly into its online store.
Amazon.com operates retail websites for Sears Canada, Bebe Stores, Marks & Spencer, Mothercare, and Lacoste. For a growing number of enterprise clients, including the UK merchants Marks & Spencer, Benefit Cosmetics' UK entity, edeals.com and Mothercare, Amazon provides a unified multichannel platform where a customer can interact with the retail website, standalone in-store terminals or phone-based customer service agents. Amazon Web Services also powers AOL's [email protected][citation needed]
Amazon’s transformation into the world’s more pervasive retail operation wouldn’t be complete unless the company began a seemingly counterintuitive push from online to offline. Starting with its brick-and-mortar bookstores in 2015 — first in Seattle and now in Chicago and New York City — Amazon established its intent to compete on all fronts with its retail competitors.
Cyber Monday generally means more retailer-wide discounts, rather than product-specific ones that pop up on Black Friday, says Novickis. But occasionally, the specific products that do get marked down on Cyber Monday are serious steals. "If a merchant stocked up on a product for Black Friday and then it didn’t sell as well as expected, there could be a deeper discount on Cyber Monday," she says.
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