Amazon gives non-Prime members free shipping at $35 or more of eligible items. Instead of simply letting users get the product with free shipping, they’ve added a discount that prices it exactly one cent below the $35 limit, while only subsidizing the price with $3.38, which is about half of what they’ll then charge you for shipping.
I’m not sure that’s entirely true.
Most of their money comes from retail, either the site, subscriptions, or the seller services they provide. AWS, while massive, isn’t what’s keeping them afloat.
You’re entirely correct though that competition with Amazon is difficult because of those additional sources of revenue. Having additional stable sources of income gives them the ability to accept lower margins in retail with less risk.
The way they make money selling things with no profit or at a loss is to ensure that someone else is always paying the difference. “Free shipping” with a paid subscription means that rather than providing shipping for a loss, they just need to do it for less than the subscription. Turns out “guy with a van” can deliver a lot of packages for quite cheap. So many that he’ll be out delivering from 3am to 9pm, and for $5 they’ll drop your package off first and call it overnight.
In some cases they can get the seller to pay for shipping as a promotional incentive, since Amazons conditioned people to look for free shipping as a precondition to considering a product.
Only give away for free what you got someone else to pay for.
Revenue is not profit.
Yes, but revenue pays for things like salaries, advertising, etc.
It helps with cash flow sure, but if it’s not profit you’re going into debt to pay that.
I mean, non profits exist. Of course it’s not the case for Amazon, but you don’t need to profit in order to exist as a company, and people still get to make money.
All companies have to earn a profit, not just to pay for the expense of the goods plus all of the overhead, but also to be able to reinvest and grow. There’s a difference between earning a livable wage while the company as a whole remains poor and earning barely enough to live on while the investors pull in massive gains year over year.
Non profit doesn’t mean no profit.
Non profits make enough profit to pay their employees, rent, and any other business needs, or they get money from other sources. They still need and make money to operate.
For a company to succeed, there must be profit, or have an outside source of funding.
You cannot pay rent, employees or other business expenses with revenue and no profit without going into debt.
Non profit means no profit. Salaries, rent, etc are not paid from profit.
That is fundamentally what profit is, revenue less expenses. By definition, profit is money that does not have anywhere to go in a business, and so gets distributed to stake holders of the company.
What do you think profit is? It seems like you’re conflicting profit with income.
Profit is revenue - cost of goods.
If you make a widget and it costs you $100 to make, and you sell it for $110, you have $10 profit. Then you have all the other expenses that it takes to run a business, lets say that’s $200.
Your revenue is $110
You profit is $10
Additional Expenses: $200
You NET profit (AKA Net Income) is $-90