Topic

AMZN

A collection of 40 issues

The appeal of conversational commerce

First things first, let’s define “conversational commerce”. When you ask queries to an AI model or chat bot about something you want to buy, and based on the AI’s research you then take decisions and complete the purchase by ordering the product on the retailer’s website, that’

Digital Advertising Industry Snapshot, Portfolio Change

As is the tradition in every earnings season, I am sharing my digital advertising Snapshot after 3Q’25 earnings. Digital ads market growth has accelerated to 18.4% in 3Q’25 (vs 15.7% in 2Q’25 and 14.1% in 3Q’24). Meta continues to gain market share every

The Great Decoupling of Labor and Capital

A programming note: I initially wanted to cover Microsoft’s earnings today, but I am changing the schedule a bit as I felt more inspired to write today’s piece. Almost two decades ago, Hewlett-Packard (HP) was the first tech company to exceed $100 Billion annual revenue threshold in 2007.

Amazon 3Q'25 Update

Amazon reported a fantastic quarter yesterday. Not only AWS growth has accelerated, it does appear such acceleration may continue at least in the near term. Moreover, the rest of the business, especially the core e-commerce continues to be a secular winner. Here are my highlights from yesterday’s call. Revenue

Amazon marketplace trends

A programming note: We are heading towards a pretty packed earnings week. As a reminder, I will cover only one company’s earnings every day. My tentative earnings coverage schedule for the next few days is: CoStar (Wednesday), Meta (Thursday), Amazon (Friday), Alphabet (Saturday) , Microsoft (Sunday), and Insurance Brokers (Monday)

Amazon's robot army

Back in June 2025, WSJ reported that while the average number of employees per Amazon facility continues to go down every year, the number of packages that Amazon ships per employee each year has increased from 175 in 2015 to almost 4,000 in 2025. This massive productivity gain largely

Amazon's "unfair" advantage in advertising

Amazon started disclosing their advertising revenue from 4Q’21. Before 4Q’21, their ad revenue was “hidden” in “other” segment. Everyone, of course, knew ads was ~80-90% of “other” revenue. Amazon’s other segment grew from quarterly revenue of $1.1 Billion in 3Q’17 to a whopping $8.1

Amazon's Ambition in Groceries: Part 2

Part 1 of this series can be read here Doug Herrington, the current CEO of Amazon Retail, became part of the S-team at Amazon in 2011. Herrington has been a key figure to push Amazon to groceries. Brad Stone in his book “Amazon Unbound” mentioned a particular memo by Herrington

The Promise and Pitfall of Agentic Commerce

We are entering the age of agentic commerce, where autonomous AI agents, acting as our digital deputies, will navigate the endless aisles of online stores, evaluating products and making purchases on our behalf. Agentic commerce promises to crush search frictions and expand the practical consideration set from a handful of

Amazon's Ambition in Groceries: Part 1

Back in 2023, Terry Smith from Fundsmith wrote the following as their rationale to exit their position in Amazon (emphasis mine): Relatively new CEO Andy Jassy enunciated some principles of investment which investment projects had to have, namely: 1. Be big and capable of delivering good returns on capital. 2.