- 1994-2005: in the early day Amazon, through the vision of Jeff Bezos was among the most prominent Internet players. Amazon had placed substantial bets on various companies and it had quickly scaled its operations. Starting from books, by the late 1990s, Amazon had already expanded into other categories, and Jeff Bezos had placed investments in various Internet startups. As the dot-com bubble burst, though, Amazon not only lost substantial amounts of money into failed bets (the epitome of that was the bankruptcy of Pets.com one of the key bets the company had placed) but it shrank in value, and many analysts predicted its demise. However, in those years, especially in the early 2000s Amazon changed its business playbook. It cut all the investments in things it could not directly control and it started to move from an e-commerce company to a platform business model.ย
- 2005-2015: By the mid-2000s Amazon had set the stage for a complete change in its business model. The company had also started to experiment with various programs and products. Some were a complete failure (like the Kindle Fire Phone) and others would turn out into incredible products, and business segments (Amazon Prime, Amazon Advertising, and Amazon AWS).ย
- 2015-2020: By the year 2015, Amazon had turned into a tech giant already, and it showed the world, finally, that not only it had survived but that it had the ability to scale at an international level. In these years, Amazon showed the world the incredible numbers behind Amazon AWS (most business players were astonished and other companies like Microsoft and Google started to double down on cloud computing as they saw the success of AWS). And the company managed to expand in Europe, Mexico, and India and tried hard also to break into China.ย
Read Next: History of Amazon.
Where is Amazon today?
Today Amazon is a diversified company, offering enterprise, B2B, and consumer products.
Amazon’s enterprise platform is comprised of AWS, which is the most profitable segment.
Amazon’s e-commerce is a two-sided marketplace, with sellers on the one hand, and consumers on the other hand.
Third-party sellers are prompted to host their stories on top of Amazon’s infrastructure, thus enabling them to expand their distribution and leverage Amazon’s fulfillment capabilities.
Thus, I also defined Amazon’s e-commerce as a B2B2C. Indeed, it leverages other businesses (third-party sellers) to revamp its product offerings to consumers.

In 2021 Amazon posted over $469 billion in revenues and over $33 billion in net profits.
Online stores contributed to over 47% of Amazon revenues, Third-party Seller Services, ย Amazon AWS, Subscription Services, Advertising revenues, and Physical Stores.
As of 2021, AWS contributed to most of Amazon’s operating income.

While Amazon is still profitable without AWS, AWS contributes to most of Amazon’s operating profits.
In 2021, Amazon generated almost $25 billion in operating profits. However, if you removed AWS, Amazon would have reported an operating profit of just over $6 billion.
And a surprising thing happened in Q3 of 2022, where Amazon without AWS would have posted a substantial operating loss.

In Q3 2022, Amazon would have posted an operating loss of almost $2.9 billion without AWS’s contribution to the overall operating income of $2.5 billion.
Read Next: History of Amazon.
Read next:
- Amazon Business Model
- Amazon Flywheel: Amazon Virtuous Cycle
- Receivables Turnover Ratio?
- Amazon Case Study
- Amazon Cash Machine Business Model
- AWS Business Model
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