Amazon: Relentless.com | The Economist

Excerpt from The Economist's latest cover story

"There is a lot of other stuff for them to buy. According to Internet Retailer, a magazine, Amazon now carries 230m items for sale in America—some 30 times the number sold by Walmart, the world’s biggest retailer, which has its own fast-growing online business—and there is no sign of let-up. Amazon’s total revenues were $74.5 billion last year, but when one takes into account the merchandise that other companies sell through its “marketplace” service the sales volume is nearly double that. Though by far the biggest online retailer in America, it is still growing faster than the 17% pace of e-commerce as a whole (see chart 1). It is the top online seller in Europe and Japan, too, and has designs on China’s vast market. Last year Amazon was the world’s ninth-biggest retailer ranked by sales; by 2018 it will be number two, predicts Kantar Retail, a research group."

Amazon: Relentless.com | The Economist