It’s Amazon’s world, we just shop in it

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20 things you might not know about the Seattle-based e-commerce giant.

A river? Amazon’s original logo was a giant ‘A’ with — that’s right — the Amazon river flowing down the middle. Bezos apparently figured the largest river in the world was fitting for a company he intended to be the largest bookstore in the world. After a few less-than-stellar logos, the company settled on the current logo, with a smile from A to Z.

A day before Amazon’s latest earnings report, it’s not up for debate whether the company has behemoth status in the online retail market.

The company does, after all, have its own cargo planes, the equivalent of an electronic concierge in millions of American homes (Alexa) and, likely soon, a fleet of drones helping bring products ordered through that concierge.

But a new report suggests the Seattle-based e-commerce giant is even bigger than imagined.

Slice Intelligence on Wednesday released data showing that spending at Amazon made up nearly half — 43 percent — of all revenue in the U.S. online retail market in 2016.

“I can’t think of another time in the history of retail where one retailer has been as dominant as Amazon,” said Ken Cassar, principal analyst for Slice.

Amazon still DOMINATES retail. Amazon accounted for 53% of all U.S. e-commerce sales growth in 2016. 18% is coming from electronics Amazon’s new digital assistant and even faster shipping are bringing the company deeper into our daily lives. Amazon revealed Tuesday that it plans to spend $1.49 billion to build its first worldwide air cargo hub and will help to sort packages and hold Amazon’s growing fleet of planes. Video provided by TheStreet

While e-commerce grew by 24 percent last year — and is expected to make up 10 percent of all retail in 2017 — Amazon accounted for more than half that growth, the report found.

Slice used anonymous receipt data aggregated from its 4.4 million-shopper panel to come up with the numbers.

The company is expected to report earnings at about $1.40 per share, up significantly from third quarter earnings that came in at about $0.52 per share, according to Zacks Investment Research.

Amazon has grown exponentially since its founding as an online book store in 1994.

But as its hold on the retail market has grown, some have begun to wonder about the impacts.

A report from last November argued that Amazon’s stranglehold on the online market was bad for competition and bad for retail workers, and could even be Supertotobet weakening community bonds.

““We argue that Amazon represents a novel and dangerous threat to competition,” said Stacy Mitchell, a co-author of the Institute for Local Self Reliance report, when the report was released.

READ MORE: Report: Amazon has stranglehold on online retail market

Cassar admitted the challenge of competing against Amazon, but data didn’t show a decrease in the number of other retailers entering the online market lately.

“If anything, there are more and more entering the online commerce arena,” he said.

Amazon Web Services, the company’s internet computing and storage business, has also grown at staggering rates in the last couple years, becoming a service that companies seemingly can’t live without.

“Amazon has redefined how tech companies are built,” said Amrit Kirpalani, CEO of Nector OM, a marketing software as a service company based in Dallas. “From Twitter to Netflix to startups and large technology companies, brands are heavily reliant on Amazon’s backbone infrastructure for their core operations, and thus, have no choice but to embrace the Amazon way.”

Daniel DeMay covers Seattle culture, business and transportation for seattlepi.com. He can be reached at 206-448-8362 or danieldemay@seattlepi.com. Follow him on Twitter: @Daniel_DeMay.

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