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Many people think of Amazon as an online retailer, but its reach goes much further.

Retail is an important part of Amazon’s business, but it’s not, in fact, the company’s main purpose. Amazon sees itself as a “customer company” and a digital platform business and has become an essential infrastructure in many people’s daily lives. The nature of infrastructure is that people only notice it when it fails to work as expected.Thus, the true extent of Amazon’s activities is almost invisible, despite the fact that they touch so many areas of life.

As a digital platform, Amazon acts as an intermediary. For example, more than 50% of the products Amazon sells on its platform are not Amazon-branded products, but come from other sellers; Amazon levies a fee on every transaction. Acting as a middleman allows Amazon to collect data from many sellers, which it applies to predict trends and sell advertising.

As a cloud computing service, Amazon provides third parties with the tools to build their businesses. Cloud computing is Amazon’s most profitable business, and it subsidizes other aspects of Amazon’s operations.

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