Amazon Has No Rivals

Vitamins, adhesive bandages, and mango jam—these are just a few of the items my family purchased last month through Amazon’s vast online shopping platform. We also shop at their supermarket chain, Whole Foods, watch TV shows via their streaming service, read books on Kindle e-readers, and browse countless websites undoubtedly powered by Amazon Web Services (AWS), their highly profitable cloud computing business.

This is not even half of the interconnected products and services offered by this global giant, which surpassed the US supermarket giant Walmart earlier this year to become the world’s largest company based on annual sales. However, why does Amazon, launched by Jeff Bezos in 1995 as an online bookstore from a rented garage, have so few serious competitors in the West regarding e-commerce? As consumers, could we not benefit from more competition?

According to reports, Amazon is certainly not without competitors in every segment it operates, including e-commerce. Major US retailers such as Walmart and Target both possess extensive and rapidly growing online retail branches and offer versions of Amazon’s Prime subscription service. In the UK, Tesco leads in online grocery sales, and Zalando is the largest online clothing retailer in Germany. Meanwhile, for ultra-cheap products, the Chinese websites Temu and Shein are major forces.

Then there is eBay, which recently received a US$55.5 billion takeover bid from video game retailer GameStop, though it subsequently rejected the offer. eBay operates a different business model from Amazon, focusing on auctions, second-hand goods, and collectibles. While GameStop expressed hope that eBay might one day become a stronger competitor to Amazon, Amazon currently remains far superior to all its rivals in terms of overall e-commerce market share. In the US, Amazon controls 40.5 per cent of all online retail sales, while its closest competitor, Walmart, holds 9.2 per cent, according to recent data. eBay sits at approximately 3 per cent. Amazon is also highly dominant in the UK, where it controls around 30 per cent of online retail sales.