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Early on as a book seller - you're likely right. They were way more agile, and put themselves in a position where they could just eat their competitors lunch.
ridiculously good subscription buying services (Prime)
Personally I don't think tax avoidance enabled this
Prime at least is physical delivery, which makes it easier to follow (for me at least). To deliver this they've taken advantages of roads and other infrastructure , educated workforce, educated and skilled customer base etc, but not paid for any of it through taxes.
They wouldn't be able to offer their service without it all being in place, but they've contributed nothing towards it.
I imagine you could make a similar claim for their IT side. They seem to set up their data centres in countries with decent infrastructure and skills to exploit (Ireland, Luxembourg), but which also conveniently behave as tax havens.
christianSpaceman-
They wouldn't be able to offer their service without it all being in place, but they've contributed nothing towards it.
Yeah I don't take issue with this. Well, maybe the 'nothing' bit, I'm not sure that's entirely fair. I'm saying it's not the hugely significant factor in their meteoric success and now dominance that it's sometimes made out to be. It's certainly a factor in their ongoing business model, it's probably not right, but businesses gonna business.
At best it gave them a bit more bandwidth to play with but that would be nothing if they hadn't delivered hot shit at the right time in the right way.
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I imagine you could make a similar claim for their IT side. They seem to set up their data centres in countries with decent infrastructure and skills to exploit (Ireland, Luxembourg), but which also conveniently behave as tax havens.
They don't have a data centre in Luxembourg but they are one of the largest employers in the country and are a major reason for immigration to Luxembourg (whether from existing Amazon people or new ones). Can't speak as to whether they did a deal on company tax but I do know there are (or at least were) a number of "tax efficient" schemes for growing companies in Luxembourg which don't need a company to be new globally, just new in Lux. It does have a lot of advantages (access to the slightly depressed border region talent pool, multi-lingual population, immigrant friendly/tolerant culture etc) but also it isn't cheap so they have to pay well.
Howard
atz
There's two stories here. The first is how did they get rich selling commoditised stuff. Books then whatever widgets. When they did that, any mail order co. could set up and play by the same rules as Amazon. Plenty of other pure play e-commerce outfits were setting up. Amazon were just better than both the new entrants and the established retail cos. where it mattered; business, tech, fulfilment, customer experience, which risks to take, luck. The combined effect of Amazon and the others put some slow old businesses in trouble. This it turns out was small beer.
The second story is how did they become a market leader in being fucking massive. They took big risks whilst delivering what people wanted; ridiculously good subscription buying services (Prime), a marketplace platform, a media platform that wasn't shit, and then they re-sold the tools they used to deliver their services to other businesses. They pretty much created a market for these. Nobody was really 'retailing' this kind of stuff.
Personally I don't think tax avoidance enabled this. I don't think being stingy with employee pay and conditions enabled this. I think both of those are a symptom of how big they are now. It's undeniable that they do it, but I don't think you can claim their success is because of it.
tl;dr they were dominating where it mattered before they were 'evil'.