Amazon’s retail enterprise, while immense and growing, is increasingly in the shadow of adjacent businesses like advertising, subscriptions and marketplace seller services. In Q2 those operations grew as fast or faster than its online and physical stores and together netted more revenue. The company’s stalwart cloud business also continues to be yet another boon to its e-commerce.
Online plus brick-and-mortar net sales topped $67 billion, while advertising plus subscription fees plus seller services, where growth was mostly higher, topped $68 billion. Sales at the AWS unit rose 17.5% year over year to nearly $31 billion.
“The solid growth and profitability of AWS and advertising should continue to outperform and support Retail,” Telsey Advisory Group analysts led by Joseph Feldman said in a note on the company’s Q2 report.
This is a unique situation in retail, though Amazon is encountering many of the same challenges. Currently that includes uncertainty around tariffs.
“There continues to be a lot of noise about the impact that tariffs will have on retail prices and consumption,” Jassy said. “Much of it thus far has been wrong and misreported. As we said before, it’s impossible to know what will happen.”
Amazon’s other businesses continue to outpace retail | Retail Dive